A Spreadsheet and a Debugger Walk into a Shell | Hacker News Reader

A Spreadsheet and a Debugger Walk into a Shell

arcan-fe.com

224 pointsJNRowe20 comments

So cool! I'd never thought about a spreadsheet interface for the shell, but it makes total sense. The other demos (a little more than halfway down the page) are amazing too:

https://arcan-fe.com/2022/04/02/the-day-of-a-new-command-lin...

While not a shell built-in, the 'sc' command provides a terminal spreadsheet:

sc: the Venerable Spreadsheet Calculator

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10699

Oof this comment makes me feel old. My first encounters with spreadsheets were in text mode dos.

Total Commander keeps DOS UI alive and is a popular alternative to explorer.

Supports Windows® 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10/11, and Windows® 3.1.

That's some dedication.

There’s some seriously impressive work that’s gone into that shell

Brings back memories of Lotus 123

this looks really great

I need to follow this more closely. I tried installing cat9 (from them as well) and it didn't work out on nixos. Might take another stab at it

This reminds me of using smalltalk where everything is an object and output can be piped in to any structure that can be programmed

Could you elaborate?

A spreadsheet it just a view broken up in to rectangle cells and that compares favorably to the JavaScript smalltalk variants I’ve seen online such as this one https://amber-lang.net/

The output when it’s not an error message can redirected in to another function and so on and so forth until it’s not entirely programming and not entirely a prebuilt interface. A smalltalk VM is like an operating system as a repl as long as you’re skilled enough to not keep hitting error messages.

A machine learning program walks into a bar. (loss .999) A machine learning program walks into a bar. (loss .625) A machine learning program ducks a bar. (loss .482)

i am surprised emacs doesn't have this already emacs seems more like the right place for this

that being said, i think the spreadsheet being a separate command line tool make more sense, i dont understand why integrate it into the shell

nushell or pwsh, might make use of a spreadsheet view, since they pass or stream objects not text , but still the spreadsheet should be a separate program

nushell has `open file.xlsx | explore --peek` which can be used to interactively select a cell contents from an Excel spreadsheet and pipe it into another command. It would be cool if there were similar tools for editing table data.

See also the `inspect` command... I feel like they could add a lot of neat Smalltalk-like interactivity (Bret Victor-level observability)

in pwsh you can

    Out-GridView

which gives you a full graphical view, you cannot edit data, and its usually the last step in a pipeline

between nushell and pwsh, i think pwsh is the way to go, only drawback it required dotnet installed, nushell being more standalone beat it on this

I have always felt pwsh is one of those "great idea, poorly implemented" things.

I mean, who puts Verbs-InCommandNames? No one who wants to actually remember all of their CLI tools. That's who.

well, its a convention , it makes it easier to guess the command name, and considering in pwsh you have hundreds of commands, finding the command can be a challenge

pwsh have autocomplete and command to help you find other commands

pwsh is actually more unixy than unix, it have more specialized commands in linux you have bigger command, commands that do at lot, and take a lot to learn

pwsh is a great idea, implemented very nicely, i dont see any major flaws , except poor adoption on linux .. and of course dotnet dependency

a native pwsh would be amazing

But... Then you have to actually use emacs.

  /shiver

re-inventing the shell, not the wheel. love it!

Liked a lot, great job!

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