Sheets: Terminal based spreadsheet tool | Hacker News Reader

Sheets: Terminal based spreadsheet tool

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Visidata is a fast popular data tool in python https://www.visidata.org/ if you just want data entry.

If I may be permitted a small plug ...

Oleo is a GNU spreadsheet going back absolutely donkey years. I cloned the repo here: https://github.com/blippy/oleo and made minimalist fixes to get the thing to compile.

I also based my own terminal-based spreadsheet based off of it call neoleo: https://github.com/blippy/neoleo

I wouldn't say that my project is particularly good, but it does have a number of features that I find useful. The next release will include Tcl bindings, so you can customise some of the workings of the app. There's also a module available where you can go to town programmatically.

It opens up a world of possibilities, including stuff like pivot tables.

  package require oleo
  load-oleo mysheet.oleo
  set ws [toMat]
  set subset [subRows $ws [mand [mstreq 2 foo] [mstreq 3 bar]]

It has what I think is a nice little query language, too. In the last line I select the rows from the spreadsheet sheet column 2 is equal to foo and column 3 is equal to bar.

I'm kinda dog-fooding it at the moment to put in place features that I need. It doesn't have the full equivalence of SQL-equivalent though.

VisiData is superb. It can work with website tabular data too; great for scraping.¹

¹ https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-09-30-visidata/

vd (visidata) is amazing. The only tool that really works for me with millions of rows csv's

See also lnav (https://lnav.org), a mini-ETL CLI power tool.

> Visidata is a fast popular data tool in python https://www.visidata.org/ if you just want data entry.

Visidata does vastly more than data entry. It's one of the most powerful applications I've used in years, and basically functions as a cross between a spreadsheet and a relational database with an extremely configurable TUI interface. It's one of the best tools available for doing ad-hoc data analysis, transformations, and joining data from multiple sources in different formats.

There are few comparable tools that allow you to open a Postgres table, a local CSV, and JSON being returned from a REST API in real time, do a complex join, filter and normalize the results, all in a single terminal session.

Thanks for showing this. What would you say the differences between the classic version of oleo and your neoleo version?

Oleo is C, circa 50k of C code, Neo(-leo) is around 5k of C++ code. A 10th of the size, but not necessarily any less powerful. Oleo has some memory leaks in places, whereas Neo has no (known) leaks.

Oleo uses lex and yacc, whereas Neo has a hand-parser.

Oleo is in the style of emacs bindings, whereas Neo is more vim-like, but without the modality.

I think the Neo code is better-structured and more readable (but I would say that, wouldn't I? - although it is far from perfect). C++ generally makes code more readable and obvious, without all that pointer arithmetic.

The internals of Oleo are more complicated. It uses byte-code for cells, for example. Neo stores a parse tree for a cell. So you can see that a lot of programming effort is saved right there.

In terms of speed, I suspect that the original Oleo is faster, although it's difficult to benchmark.

Neo is also heading towards being a library that you can compile in with other C++ code. Plus there's an interface to Tcl, which Oleo never had. So you get a lot of extensibility there which Oleo doesn't have.

I also think Neo is more generally accessible. It's got something in the way of a menu (still early stages), which helps. Neo is just generally less fiddly with editing cells, IMO. The mouse works, too.

Oleo does have an interface using Motif. Very early-90s. There's even an interface to GTk, although I don't think that works properly. I decided to abandon all that and just stick to an ncurses interface. After all, if you want a fancy interface, there are proper options these days like LibreCalc, Caliigra and Gnumeric.

To add to the cool things you can do with Neoleo, I wrote a little TCL extension that loads current processes into the spreadsheet. I added custom bindings so that you could search for processes, go to its parent, and kill processes.

I'm also half-way to adding a little calendar extension, too.

Thanks for the extensive write up

> Oleo is a GNU spreadsheet going back absolutely donkey years.

Third line of README:

> As of this writing (February 1999)

Whoah, you weren't kidding!

Yes, I'm partial to a bit of retro. It does back to around 1991, IIRC. I don't think it had a curses interface in those days.

And check this: version 1.2.2 is available on Aminet, for the Amiga. How's that for a blast from the past?

You might say … it's As Easy As[2] 1-2-3?[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As-Easy-As

What's old is new again.

Exactly. I immediately thought, “So, we’ve invented VisiCalc all over again.”

TBF, VisiCalc is not open source, and this is relatively fresh start, so I don't think it's fair to compare this to a reinvention.

Isn’t that what reinvention means?

I suppose that's fair, and I concede, though I think you can play with the definition enough to make anything spreadsheet (even GUIs and webapps) be "reinvention" of visicalc, so I think the term is actually pretty meaningless.

My point was, it's a spreadsheet in a term window. That's basically what VisiCalc was in the 80s.

Appreciate the clarification, and sorry, I wasn't trying to be a pedantic pain in the ass :-)

No worries; all good.

All spreadsheets used to run in your terminal, in the old days. You can still download one here and I wouldn't be surprised if it still works: https://winworldpc.com/product/quattro-pro/4x

You can run Lotus 1-2-3 for Unix in modern Linux : https://github.com/taviso/123elf

Lotus 1-2-3 was the first spreadsheet I ever used around age 9 so this is really bringing me back!

I am shy to admit I used visicalc on an HP-85.....1980 ?¿? maybe...I learned the periodic table with a basic program I made on that piece of art.

What a great name :) ("elf" = 11 in German)

what's the relevance of 11 in this context?

Yes! My first encounter with spreadsheets was SuperCalc for CP/M, and I suppose you would call it a "TUI" nowadays.

there are some videos about quattro in those days and i was sincerely surprised how featured and advanced it was

the ratio of space / cpu / capabilities (beside the network part) is something that reaches deep in my brain

Right? Visicalc wasn't using anything that a terminal didn't offer.

To be clear, this is a TUI spreadsheet called "sheets" not a TUI interface to Google Sheets spreadsheets. Unless I completely missed something.

That’s correct

Semi-related: I always wished there was something like the unholy combination of a spreadsheet and notebook rolled into one. I picture it notebook-like at the top level, then each cell is a widget that the host language can reference parts of in other cells (probably with a variable (eg: something like mathematicas `Out[_]`) or a built in construct (like the `$ABC123` forms in spreadsheet formulas)). A notebook interface would also be good (I think) as a straight up terminal as well, as you (I) typically want to run commands in an order like in a notebook

Some time ago, I remember Microsoft having made a video for a "courier tablet" that was essentially an electronic notebook. Either side of the spine was, by default, just plain "paper" that could be drawn or written on. It had some kind of intelligence to recognize stuff, so if you started drawing out a grid it had basic capabilities that could be attached to that grid, like spreadsheets.

At least, these are things I think I remember. It's not quite what you're imagining, but it was cool and along the same lines.

I think that combination exists using Obsidian.md, via built-in "Bases", or dataview / datacore plugins.

Do you know TreeSheets[1]? It kind of sounds similar to your notebook idea.

https://strlen.com/treesheets/

If I’m remembering correctly, I had bought a Borland Turbo C++ compiler circa 1994 (for DOS) that came with a demo sheets application you could build and run.

Does anyone remember this, I can’t find it now.

See also, one of the older / more-robust entrants in this space [0], and one of the more innovative (still from a hot-second ago now…) [1].

All the best,

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

1. https://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/

Teapot is pretty great, it's too bad there is close to zero room for real innovation in the spreadsheet domain. For the most part if it's not spreadsheeting how prophet Dan Bricklin envisioned, people don't want it.