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Comment by bonsai_spool

3 days ago

Are there good command-line interfaces for spreadsheets? I don't do anything super financially-important and I'd prefer to stay in the terminal for quick editing of things, especially if I can have Vi keybindings.

There is SC and now sc-im: https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im

You can also literally run Lotus 123 if you want. Someone has binaries to make it work on linux. or under dosemu

Visidata[0] is a killer data swiss army knife. It's even inspired off Visicalc

[0] https://www.visidata.org/

  • It's weird but visidata is my favorite spreadsheet.

    "But... visidata is not a spreadsheet"

    I know, that's what makes it so weird.

    On contemplation, I think I grew dissatisfied with the normal spreadsheet data model, I wanted something bettered structured than the "it's a big bag of cells" that spreadsheets present, I wanted row security. The best I found was the relational database. I currently use a local postgres db for most things I would have used a spreadsheet for. The interfaces sort of suck in comparison but at least I have sane data structures.

    • Microsoft access was always a moderately mediocre database but it was also always an amazing spreadsheet for so many use cases.

I want to mention teapot. First an apology, it's not actually a good match for for question, sure, it's a curses spreadsheet, but it was made by someone who thought about the fundamentals of the problem a little too much. So it is probably a little too weird for someone who just wants to spreadsheet as Dan Bricklin intended.

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

In short cell address are normalized @(1,2,3) instead of A1 or r1c1. real references so address rewriting hacks($A$1) are not needed. formula references so you can use a single master formula, and clocked expressions which allow circular dependencies/simulation.

Probably a little too different for casual use but worth taking a look at, if nothing else to challenge your ideas of what a spreadsheet has to be.

While looking up the website I found a rewrite in rust, which is cool I guess, someone is keeping the dream alive, I will leave a link to that as well.

https://github.com/veridit/teapot

This might be programmer-brain, but I find sqlite is pretty nice for things people would use a spreadsheet for. It’s a little bit higher friction, but when I started designing a Improv-like terminal spreadsheet a while ago, I eventually realized I was just reinventing databases.

Oh man, a TUI spreadsheet application that can edit ODF or XLSX format would be absolutely killer. Would love to hear if anyone knows of such a tool