Teapot: Type-Safe 3D Spreadsheet | Hacker News Reader

Teapot: Type-Safe 3D Spreadsheet

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79 pointssnazz15 comments

Are there any screenshots or videos demonstrating this? It was a bit hard to navigate as the site is mixed language so I may have missed an obvious link

I really like the idea of teapot, and keep trying to use it. But I end up going back to sc-im each time as it seems to click better in my brain.

Does anyone have suggestions for how to get teapot to click, or suggestions for other terminal spreadsheets?

https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im

Maybe https://www.visidata.org/

> In traditional flat spread sheets, you have to have the ability of hiding columns or rows to hide intermediate results. This indicates that two dimensions are not enough, which is why teapot is three-dimensional. The third dimension can be imagined like multiple layers on top of each other, usable without the awkwardness of multiple worksheets in established spreadsheet software.

I really hope it supports multiple worksheets in addition to the 3D! Additional worksheets usually contain data that's by nature best indexed from (0, 0, 0). I'd rather write @("Items", x(), y(), 0) than @(x(), y(), items_offset)

Why not just write @(x(), y(), z(“items”))? Named cells was a feature.

My immediate thought is excel is 3d — through worksheets - it’s just the calling syntax is horrible.

It would be hard to displace excel at this stage. But if there was a) a good gui and b) a translator that allowed you to save a Teapot spreadsheet as excel for sharing… I’d consider switching.

Why offer less features?

I just tried the Windows (GUI) version. Three times in a row, I entered numbers into two cells, and when I tried to sum them into a third cell the app closed without an error message. I think I'll give it a pass.

I feel like spreadsheets are the wrong approach to the sort of things they're used for anyway. People always end up using a single sheet to store multiple tables, which is a recipe for disaster.

You don't need 3D sheets, what you really want is a canvas where you can add multiple tables on the same "sheet" that don't share rows or columns at all.

You can sort of achieve that in Excel by restricting each sheet to exactly one table, but it's very unergonomic (do you have an entire sheet for each scalar input?) so nobody does it.

I'm sure someone has made something like I've described.

Microsoft very nearly made this back in 1990, with their Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) [1] technology, in Windows 3.1 and MS Office.

From the name OLE, I envisaged a Word doc with multiple embedded Excel tables, with calculations in one table used to drive those in another, and Word formulae able to include any Excel table/cell value.

In practice, anything complicated caused the compound document to freeze up or not update.

My "half way house" to that vision of arbitrary tables would been a traditional Excel worksheet with a UI able to be "cut" horizontally so that different row ranges could choose their own column widths. A kind of step-sister to the Freeze Rows command.

The A1:B2-style cell references would still cover the whole worksheet. Just now each section could pick their own column widths.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding

https://strlen.com/treesheets/

Bit unclear from the website if that supports formulas but yeah that's the sort of thing I was thinking!

:( was hoping for a sweet gui but it’s text based.

Since it’s not limited to a visual paradigm, why not use infinite dimensions?

It does say there's a GUI version

The text interface is curses-based - so while it may not be rendering graphics pixel by pixel, it's still laying characters out in two dimensions rather than e.g. presenting you with a list of cell values as unformatted text. So it's visual in the same way as Vi(m) is visual.

I’ve been using R as essentially a command line driven spreadsheet. It’s very good at ad hoc analysis in this case.

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