71–80 of 131 posts
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.
Pretty cool! It's kinda amusing that we've gone from TUI (VisiCalc/Lotus 1-2-3) to GUI (Excel), and back to TUI though.
Are there any good emacs modes for spreadsheeting?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
show me how you start excel in your terminal
' open /Applications/Microsoft Excel.app/
open -b com.Microsoft.Excel
Disadvantage: autocomplete doesn’t work on that in the terminal.
But this is pretty cool
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean precisely by "character addressing UI"? I can infer approximately what you mean, but I had never heard that phrase before and could not Google it, so was wondering how precisely you define that as presumably slightly distinct from other more common terms for text mode applications.
thanks! i meant 'cursor-addressing', to avoid the ambiguous term 'tui', which usually (and per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface ) means cursor-addressing, but nominally also includes actual text-based user interfaces, as seen in e.g. the traditional unix utilities.
For me, the crucial difference is that they're usable over ssh and tmux, not the type of cursor they have (if any).
Pretty cool! It's kinda amusing that we've gone from TUI (VisiCalc/Lotus 1-2-3) to GUI (Excel), and back to TUI though.
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
And if that requires any tradeoffs like it did for GUIs (no hover, no small elements) it'll end up getting dumbed down for mobile like GUIs did.
tried this out a while back and ultimately settled on visidata instead https://github.com/saulpw/visidata
Could you explain what made you prefer visidata over SCIM?
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 best way to get the answers that they are getting out of the spreadsheet is to write code. But because they can't code, they have to use a spreadsheet.
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.
You could also make the "speed" argument (just a quick calculation) for spreadsheets, but in that case, I find something like a python REPL just as quick, and still better anyway.