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SES: Simple Emacs Spreadsheet

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21–27 of 27 posts

Re: SES: Simple Emacs Spreadsheet

#21
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because?

Elsewhere in the manual it seems to imply that formulas can include arbitrary Emacs Lisp functions, which would make it quite easy to implement a virus as there appears to be no sandboxing. What it probably means is that viruses written for other spreadsheet implementations won't work on it. Edit: never mind; I read further and it does do some sandboxing based on the same whitelisting principles as directory-local va…

Even still, pure interpreters are not immune to vulnerabilities. One buffer overflow or bad array lookup and you're hosed.

Re: SES: Simple Emacs Spreadsheet

#22
post #15
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean something like "sc"?

Or its more active fork scim: https://github.com/andmarti1424/scim

Thank you! I have been using sc for years, but really, REALLY wished it had the option to undo. Glad to see it's been forked and that feature was added.

Re: SES: Simple Emacs Spreadsheet

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elsewhere in the manual it seems to imply that formulas can include arbitrary Emacs Lisp functions, which would make it quite easy to implement a virus as there appears to be no sandboxing. What it probably means is that viruses written for other spreadsheet implementations won't work on it. Edit: never mind; I read further and it does do some sandboxing based on the same whitelisting principles as directory-local va…

Even still, pure interpreters are not immune to vulnerabilities. One buffer overflow or bad array lookup and you're hosed.

I must admit that I haven't heard of buffer overflows in emacs lisp.

Re: SES: Simple Emacs Spreadsheet

#24
post #4

These days one can use org-mode tables for quite a bit of spreadsheet stuff.

It might just be me, but i've found manipulating tables and formulae in Org to be nothing but pain. I probably don't understand enough how they work, though (i love and daily use many other Org features though). SES looks pretty fine to me, at first glance!

This is exactly my experience as well. I more or less use org mode all the time for organizing tasks, preparing document drafts, etc. I really like the HTML and other format exports for getting quick drafts.

Re: SES: Simple Emacs Spreadsheet

#25
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even still, pure interpreters are not immune to vulnerabilities. One buffer overflow or bad array lookup and you're hosed.

I must admit that I haven't heard of buffer overflows in emacs lisp.

Right. When all of the language's data structures are garbage collected and the language has no pointer types, buffer overflows become much rarer.

There are a few array-lookup operations like AREF, but they do bounds checking (at run time, when the check is easier to get right).

Re: SES: Simple Emacs Spreadsheet

#26
post #4

These days one can use org-mode tables for quite a bit of spreadsheet stuff.

It might just be me, but i've found manipulating tables and formulae in Org to be nothing but pain. I probably don't understand enough how they work, though (i love and daily use many other Org features though). SES looks pretty fine to me, at first glance!

If you use the edit-formula mode (which you should, C-c ') you should have real-time highlighting of the affected cells of any expression you write.

I agree it's not so plain and cut like Excel, but it's not terrible either.

You can probably find more useful things (like turning coordinate grid on/off) in the Emacs manual too: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Edit...

Re: SES: Simple Emacs Spreadsheet

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might just be me, but i've found manipulating tables and formulae in Org to be nothing but pain. I probably don't understand enough how they work, though (i love and daily use many other Org features though). SES looks pretty fine to me, at first glance!

If you use the edit-formula mode (which you should, C-c ') you should have real-time highlighting of the affected cells of any expression you write. I agree it's not so plain and cut like Excel, but it's not terrible either. You can probably find more useful things (like turning coordinate grid on/off) in the Emacs manual too: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Edit...

Just for fun, I tried using ses-mode inside org-babel.

It didn't work for a new empty code-block, but if I pasted an existing ses-mode file into it, it did actually work.

So you can have your org-mode cake and eat it too with ses :)

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