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SCIM: Ncurses based, Vim-like spreadsheet

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Re: SCIM: Ncurses based, Vim-like spreadsheet

#101

Post by pmelendez »

executesorder66 wrote: post #98
tannhaeuser wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wrong in more than one way IMO. While vi might be a code editor first and foremost, not all vi users are coders. There are copy writers, academic and literature, having a need for fast and focussed touch typing (George R. R. Martin comes to mind as prominent WordStar user). The entire point of SGML/XML/HTML markup is to be able to create rich text documents without binary formats and special editors; this is a…

I don't disagree with your first paragraph, but I don't think it is relevant to what I was saying. > Conversely, even if you are a coder, classic spreadsheets are extremely useful for any type of ad-hoc reproducible calculation Again, I still feel like code is the ideal solution to "ad-hoc reproducible calculations" > the point is that you can cross-reference cell values and copy/paste with relative cell positions to…

> Again, I still feel like code is the ideal solution to "ad-hoc reproducible calculations"

I am a developer and I do my personal budgeting on a spreadsheet. It was easier to setup and maintain, and follows my process better than the personal finance software I have used before. Could I have made a little program for this? Sure, but it would be time consuming and I have better projects to spend my time on.

Re: SCIM: Ncurses based, Vim-like spreadsheet

#102

Post by playingalong »

bregma wrote: post #85
fbn79 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The great drawback of TUI app is that are quite unusable from touch devices, or generally devices without a keyboard). If you find a way to make them usable on mobile I think they can get a great comeback

If you can find a way to make touch-friendly interfaces useful on desktop devices with a large screen and a keyboard maybe then they'll take off. Better yet, make all user interfaces the same as a toaster. Everyone can use a toaster. Bread goes in, push the lever. One universal way of thinking for everyone and everything. No domination by the tyranny of choice.

You might have not seen different kind of tosters.

Re: SCIM: Ncurses based, Vim-like spreadsheet

#103

Post by k2enemy »

I gave sc-im a try years ago but quickly hit a showstopper for my needs. The built-in functions are very limited (for example no MEDIAN), but you can write your own external functions. However, external functions can only accept a single cell, and not a range of cells, as input. For me, operating on a range of cells is kind of the point of a spreadsheet. It seems that this hasn't been addressed yet.

Re: SCIM: Ncurses based, Vim-like spreadsheet

#104

Post by dmwilcox »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #95
executesorder66 wrote: post #80

This is really cool, but I don't think this is very useful. In my opinion: if you can use vim, you can probably code, or at least figure it out without too much trouble. If you can code, then you don't need a spreadsheet. You can just write a program to crunch the numbers, or produce a report etc. Excel is so popular, because it is a way for non-coders to crunch a bunch of numbers in a relatively easy way. And the be…

That's wrong in more than one way IMO. While vi might be a code editor first and foremost, not all vi users are coders. There are copy writers, academic and literature, having a need for fast and focussed touch typing (George R. R. Martin comes to mind as prominent WordStar user). The entire point of SGML/XML/HTML markup is to be able to create rich text documents without binary formats and special editors; this is a…

Let me tell you the story of how i came to love and use sc-im instead of my own solution.

Multi-country taxes are too much fun. Every dollar/GBP amount needs to be converted to the other currency for taxes in that country.

I originally did this in libre office but I got annoyed at it and wrote a markdown pipeline to produce PDFs for my accountants.

I would do data entry in CSV and wrote a CSV to markdown converter. Along the way I wrote a simple CSV formula language with just a couple of functions that would do column level operations e.g. =MUL(C, E) to multiply columns C and E.

This worked pretty well, and I could make a small directory of sorted markdown files to assemble, and a Makefile to transform the CSV+formula files to flat CSVs.

But CSV input was kind of annoying and my formula language wasn't easy to extend, or very nice. So I jumped at sc-im which can directly output markdown tables.

Anyway, I highly recommend sc-im, the .sc files are a fine replacement for my custom solution and I haven't looked back (and taxes are coming again soon!)

Re: SCIM: Ncurses based, Vim-like spreadsheet

#105

Post by brushfoot »

executesorder66 wrote: post #80

This is really cool, but I don't think this is very useful. In my opinion: if you can use vim, you can probably code, or at least figure it out without too much trouble. If you can code, then you don't need a spreadsheet. You can just write a program to crunch the numbers, or produce a report etc. Excel is so popular, because it is a way for non-coders to crunch a bunch of numbers in a relatively easy way. And the be…

> If there is a use case for spreadsheets that is not better served by some real code, I'm interested to hear what it is.

Think of spreadsheets as a convention-over-configuration low-code environment with a tightly coupled GUI for spinning up run-almost-anywhere apps that non-coders can modify. One of the few low-code environments that I actually like.

I'm a solopreneur whose SaaS product I coded from scratch. I love GPPLs, but I also create spreadsheets all the time.

Sometimes that's because of the stage of an idea: There's a new process you've discovered you need, but you don't have time to invest in building/buying/learning a tailor-made solution.

A case in point is a business overview dashboard I built to keep an eye on the metrics I care about. It pulls data from disparate sources using Power Query, which is built into Excel and can pull from databases, APIs, CSVs, etc. There's no hosting infra and no new monthly fee as I already had the Excel license.

Another nice thing about spreadsheets is that today, they're multi-user and real-time collaborative. You can send someone a link and both edit an Excel or Google Docs spreadsheet in the browser with very low ceremony. And if they're on a power user, they can modify the formulas themselves. That's a bad thing for some use cases but a truly great thing for others.

The ubiquity, the local-first option, the tightly coupled GUI, the widely known syntax...those things make spreadsheets very attractive for certain types of projects.

For others, building an app is the right answer. They both have a place.

Re: SCIM: Ncurses based, Vim-like spreadsheet

#106

Post by sesm »

meindnoch wrote: post #86
djha-skin wrote: post #62

Where have you been all my life. This fills such a hole in the market -- a Vim-like terminal spreadsheet tool. The terminal tools have gotten so much better in the last few years. There's a real Renaissance happening.

It's only because you can't put Electron apps in the terminal (yet).

But you can already put React in the terminal with react-curse.

Re: SCIM: Ncurses based, Vim-like spreadsheet

#107

Post by gespadas »

meindnoch wrote: post #86
djha-skin wrote: post #62

Where have you been all my life. This fills such a hole in the market -- a Vim-like terminal spreadsheet tool. The terminal tools have gotten so much better in the last few years. There's a real Renaissance happening.

It's only because you can't put Electron apps in the terminal (yet).

No, PLEASE DON'T!

Re: SCIM: Ncurses based, Vim-like spreadsheet

#109

Post by pridkett »

This is great and probably a nice complement if I can get it working with my Visidata[0] workflow for data files.

If you’re looking just for spreadsheets, Travis Ormandy somehow managed to get Lotus 1-2-3 to run on Linux a few years ago[1]. It’s a neat comparison point.

[0] https://www.visidata.org/ [1] https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html

Re: SCIM: Ncurses based, Vim-like spreadsheet

#110

Post by Gormo »

kkukshtel wrote: post #108

For something similar but different, I highly recommend people check out Visidata: https://www.visidata.org/ It's saved my ass on multiple occasions for data wrangling and munging and highly recommend people use it in their own toolkit.

Another strong recommend for VisiData. I've been using it for a few years now, it's probably saved me months worth of cumulative effort in tasks I'd have otherwise used either spreadsheets or databases for. In fact, I almost never touch spreadsheets for ad-hoc data processing anymore.
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