CLI)

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16 points·leonim··4 comments

It's weird but I think Visidata is the best spreadsheet software out there. "But", I hear you cry, "visidata is not a spreadsheet." I know, I know, that is what is weird about it.

To me it is amazing at exploring data. I wish we had that same interface on every place I'm looking at a table of data.

I can't see it replacing Excel or other spreadsheets for people who make heavy use of spreadsheets in their jobs. For a terminal junkie like me, who wants/needs to make sense of data that is much bigger than my screen, Visidata is much better than a spreadsheet. I can filter and partition data easily.

I used to have to use perl/awk/sed/sort/comm/grep to help me put that data in some format that was useful. Visidata is much easier and faster to use.

I'll say it again, Visidata is one my favorite new CLI/TUI tools over the last few years. It makes it extremely easy to explore/modify structured data in the terminal.

In the 2.9.1 release, they added support for: - window functions listing values from around the current row. - XDG support for config files. - new loaders for Apache Arrow (IPC and streaming) and parquet formats - Ability to quickly browse zip files on the web. - And even some support for Windows users. Though I usually think of this as mostly a *nix terminal based tool.

It can still load and view many different types of file formats like csv, usv, lsv, json, Excel.

Check out the tutorial and youtube videos.

Here are Saul Pwanson's YouTube videos showing off Visidata. Saul is the developer of Visidata:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxu7QdBkC7drrAGfYzatP...

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