Luckysheet, an open-source spreadsheet • Hacker News Board

Re: Luckysheet, an open-source spreadsheet

#31

Post by rwmj » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:07 AM UTC

I wish people wouldn't copy Excel (or Google apps for that matter). Those spreadsheets are terrible. It still baffles me that none of them can do sideways scrolling correctly, they are all incredibly awkward to edit, the formulae are fundamental to how they work yet hidden and obscure, they do weird "magical" stuff to strings like turning them into numbers or dates when you didn't ask, etc.

I'd really like to see people explore new paradigms. Something that has the functionality of a spreadsheet but looks nothing like current spreadsheets.

Re: Luckysheet, an open-source spreadsheet

#32

Post by brylie » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

iCarrot wrote: post #14

bestouff wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see why it's an advantage.

I can't see why more options to choose from is not an advantage.

More options is good for rapid evolution of a new domain. Eventually though, we need collaborative effort to take established ideas to a mature state.

For example, there are a number of fledgling open-source nonlinear video editors (NLEs) -- to name a few in no particular order Kdenlive, Openshot, Olive, OpenMovieEditor, Blender Video Sequence Editor, Shotcut, Cinelerra, and Flowblade. I say this with full respect to the authors and contributors to those projects, we just need ONE open-source NLE that is on par with Final Cut or Premiere Pro.

Re: Luckysheet, an open-source spreadsheet

#33

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:16 AM UTC

sabellito wrote: post #2

Language files blank comment code ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- JavaScript 142 54627 91825 243672 CSS 9 790 238 5908 HTML 2 10 1 43 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SUM: 153 55427 92064 249623 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- without the demoData dir. that's nuts

That seems reasonable for a full-featured spreadsheet. If you think it can be done in 10k with all the features, go for it.

Re: Luckysheet, an open-source spreadsheet

#34

Post by patchtopic » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:29 AM UTC

smartmic wrote: post #26

I still cannot wrap my head around why so many folks want to use such applications in a web browser. For me, web browser applications never reach the responsiveness and ease of use of well crafted desktop applications written in any decent systems programming language or even interpreted languages (not speaking of Javascript). Maybe I am getting old, but having the browser as a platform for programs is huge setback f…

A tabular, instantly updating set of information is one I'm frequently discussing with groups of people online, it is ridiculously handy even with the overhead of a web browser slowing things down, if it's updating live. Of course a secure and easy to set up way to do it without the browser would be great as well.

Re: Luckysheet, an open-source spreadsheet

#35

Post by continuational » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:39 AM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #31

I wish people wouldn't copy Excel (or Google apps for that matter). Those spreadsheets are terrible . It still baffles me that none of them can do sideways scrolling correctly, they are all incredibly awkward to edit, the formulae are fundamental to how they work yet hidden and obscure, they do weird "magical" stuff to strings like turning them into numbers or dates when you didn't ask, etc. I'd really like to see pe…

I rather like the Airtable concept - it feels like a spreadsheet, but the columns are typed, and it can do joins.

It's a shame that it's so limited (50,000 rows in the most expensive plan).

Re: Luckysheet, an open-source spreadsheet

#36

Post by raziel2p » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:42 AM UTC

smartmic wrote: post #26

I still cannot wrap my head around why so many folks want to use such applications in a web browser. For me, web browser applications never reach the responsiveness and ease of use of well crafted desktop applications written in any decent systems programming language or even interpreted languages (not speaking of Javascript). Maybe I am getting old, but having the browser as a platform for programs is huge setback f…

Available everywhere without installing anything, and I don't need to worry about file formats. With Google Drive I also appreciate that I can write custom functions using javascript which I already know, rather than learn some obscure language.

I tried gnumeric just now and the crappy looking toolbar and the poor autocomplete experience for formula functions was enough to put me off.

Re: Luckysheet, an open-source spreadsheet

#37

Post by asplake » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:47 AM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #31

I wish people wouldn't copy Excel (or Google apps for that matter). Those spreadsheets are terrible . It still baffles me that none of them can do sideways scrolling correctly, they are all incredibly awkward to edit, the formulae are fundamental to how they work yet hidden and obscure, they do weird "magical" stuff to strings like turning them into numbers or dates when you didn't ask, etc. I'd really like to see pe…

Terrible, but extraordinarily successful.

Re: Luckysheet, an open-source spreadsheet

#38

Post by robbiejs » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:48 AM UTC

This looks like a really great effort, better than other canvas spreadsheets I have seen. Great work!

Re: Luckysheet, an open-source spreadsheet

#39

Post by app4soft » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 10:01 AM UTC

smartmic wrote: post #26

I still cannot wrap my head around why so many folks want to use such applications in a web browser. For me, web browser applications never reach the responsiveness and ease of use of well crafted desktop applications written in any decent systems programming language or even interpreted languages (not speaking of Javascript). Maybe I am getting old, but having the browser as a platform for programs is huge setback f…

> For example, as a free Excel alternative, I fall back to Gnumeric (http://www.gnumeric.org/) from time to time.

Gnumeric is useful, but its GUI is very laggy (more laggy than LibreOffice Calc). Sadly, there NO fast & usable Qt-based alternative to Excell for Linux yet.

As lightweight spreadsheet app for Linux I use Qt-based mtCellEdit[0], which does not support .xls/.xlsx formats & could not fully replace Excell too.

[0] https://github.com/matyler/mtCellEdit

Re: Luckysheet, an open-source spreadsheet

#40

Post by adrianmsmith » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 10:15 AM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #31

I wish people wouldn't copy Excel (or Google apps for that matter). Those spreadsheets are terrible . It still baffles me that none of them can do sideways scrolling correctly, they are all incredibly awkward to edit, the formulae are fundamental to how they work yet hidden and obscure, they do weird "magical" stuff to strings like turning them into numbers or dates when you didn't ask, etc. I'd really like to see pe…

> It still baffles me that none of them can do sideways scrolling correctly

Ironically the original version of Google Sheets could do sideways scrolling correctly. At some point (maybe around 2010?) to be more like Excel.