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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

But if you actually need a simple spreadsheet, then Google probably has you covered (and yes, I know we all hate google).

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...or if you need one that works in a terminal, I've got you covered :)

https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/spreadsheet.html

I used sc to calculate my timesheets for a year or two before migrating to LibreOffice out of convenience. The office manager found it amusing that I'd print off the sc files on a dot matrix printer that was still kicking around, but occasionally I'd accidentally "put" instead of "write" and the .sc listing would come screaming out of the printer for a few pages.

I'll have to check out sc-im. You had me at CSV!

>Perhaps I’ll update this article in 3 months with my experiences and describe any limitations I ran into… or if I gave up and switched to something else.

And? BTW, I've really enjoyed all of your deep dives into DOS software. There is a nostalgia element for sure, but I still think many elements of those UIs were incredibly efficient (e.g. the Lotus 1-2-3 menus system you described) even compared to today.

Thanks! I still use 123 basically daily, It's really grown on me and I can use it very efficiently.

I wrote a display driver to fix a few quirks when using it in a modern terminal (https://github.com/taviso/lotusdrv), but once that was working I don't really have any complaints, it really works beautifully.

The HP Palmtop was amazingly powerful for its time - because it came with 123.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_95LX

It's arguably still better to this day at being a portable spreadsheet computer than phones.

There's also Teapot, with FLTK or ncurses-based UI: https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/how-to-use-teapot-l...

Archived homepage of the project: https://web.archive.org/web/20211124073408/https://www.synta...

Its most relevant feature seems to be 3-dimensional tables. From the home page: "Instead of the unflexible and complicated syntax used to address the values of cells in traditional spread sheets ("B1" or "R1C2"), teapot uses for a more functional approach: "@(1,2,0)". This results in an easily understandable syntax and despite the very few basic functions, very powerful semantics."

Haven't used it myself but I was quite curious about it a few years ago.

EDIT: Has anybody succeeded in entirely replacing his/her spreadsheet needs with e.g. awk scripts? Seems like a nice exercise in the "first simplify your data structures, then analyze" paradigm.

I have pretty much replaced my spreadsheets with postgres(sqlite would have worked as well, but... I really like postgres) simple calculations end up as views, more complicated ones end up as an external script. a postgres function would work, but I find external scripts easier to manage.

Once, as a sort of programing kata, I wanted to see if I could turn a simple spreadsheet I found on the internet into a view.

transformer calculator: https://ludens.cl/Electron/trafos/trafos.html

I was successful in that I was able to put the logic in what would have been a ten line program into, well, this 150 line monstrosity.

same transformer calculator as a view: https://pastebin.com/xyDeAV7R

Takeaway: the relational database works well to replace the spreadsheet when the spreadsheet is used as a data store, not so much when the spreadsheet is used as a programing language. but for that, the purpose built programing language is far superior.

Most of my spreadsheets are long lived, I wouldn't want to risk tying them to something ephemeral like a Google account.

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