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Csv.vim: A Filetype plugin for CSV files (github.com/chrisbra)
147 points by s1291 on Feb 11, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 25 comments



I’ll give this try. I hate whenever I have to use a spreadsheet and leave the comfort of vim.

Regardless, anyone able to write this much vimscript and remain sane deserves the greatest respect.


I would suggest using the Jeremy Singer-Vine Tutorial: https://jsvine.github.io/intro-to-visidata/the-big-picture/v...

I had always wanted to use vim to do some CSV viewing and editing, but I never found a good solution. This plugin looks pretty amazing from the demo, but I would still recommend VisiData. It does tables in a more natural way. Plus VisiData can handle many different file types. Menus were recently added to VisiData which helps make it more approachable.


Now that's a demo! Takes you from a gentle reminder how to run a program in your shell to showing off an impressive feature then tells you how to discover more.

Every project should take notes on this.


csv.vim's author is very prolific. Beyond the awesome plugins in his personal GitHub¹, he seems to end up on the other end of the merge button for a bunch of other vim things too. And then when you go poking around in $VIMRUNTIME he keeps popping up again and again.</fandom>

¹ NrrwRgn and unicode.vim deserve a special mention IMO, but others are great as well!


Ehn, as with anything, it's not that bad once you get used to it but yes, it's still quite bad... but not that bad! But bad. You know, kinda like JavaScript :trollface:


I've used sc-im for pretty minimal spreadsheet operators for a while now, but have hated needing a special file format for it, plus it's not available in a lot of package managers. Love that I can do simple calculation in Vim now.


sc-im works with csv too


I can really recommend VisiData for exploring CSV files in the commandline

https://www.visidata.org/


I'm a very passive hackernews reader, and don't engage much with posts. I want to break that passivity to say that Visidata is the tool that has given me the greatest joy out of any other piece of software I've ever used.


`vd` is amazing; I used to fire a Notebook + pandas any time i had to deal with a CSV/excel file. Now, I can do most of it just from `vd`.


Can't believe I didn't know about this before. Just shared this with our entire dev team and they like it!


Does it have vi keybindings?


Yes, and they are active by default.


Visidata is such a gem of software! A real good example of what kind of UIs are possible for "power users"


I just recently started the move back from GUI to CLI, and tools like this only reinforce my decision :).

Thanks for sharing.


Wow very cool. Probably an allusion to VisiCalc in the name?


Wow! Where has this been hiding? And looking forward to trying csv.vim.


2nded!


It's weird seeing this here, I made a small PR to it that was merged to add a few statistical functions back in 2017. Good plugin though!


It would be cool if TUI tools like Quattro Pro and Wordperfect or WordStar could be ported to Linux.


Regarding Wordstar:

- There are editors with key bindings similar to Wordstar, like JOE.

- From what I remember of Wordstar, it used formatting commands which begin with a period on a new line ("dot commands"), such as:

    .op
to "omit page number". That's reminiscent of troff, which also has dot commands. So basically, I suspect you could have a "vaguely Wordstar-like experience" if you learn a few troff dot commands and use JOE to edit the text. Of course external tooling is used to compile the troff to PDF and whatnot.

- There is also something called Wordtsar: http://wordtsar.ca/ This looks to be a Wordstar clone that the author mainly develops on Linux.

Hey look, someone in May 1985 was asking in comp.unix.wizards if there is a way to convert Wordstar fiels to Troff.

https://www.tuhs.org/Usenet/comp.unix.wizards/1985-May/01371...

That would be right around the time I would have been typing out grade 8 homework in Wordstar, running under CP/M via a Z80 coprocessor card inserted into my Hong-Kong-made Apple II+ clone.


> There is also something called Wordtsar:

Yeah, Wordtsar is amazing app![0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wordtsar.ca


I can't believe that I did not know about troff. I had heard it being mentioned before but I had never seen a demo. It's great.

Thanks for mentioning it.


If it meant we got more amazing stories like the Lotus 1-2-3 one¹, then I'm all for dosemu.

¹ https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/lotus123.html


in emacs org mode you can import csv file and use it as spreadsheet. Including referencing data from multiple tables.




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