What does HackerNews think of visidata?

A terminal spreadsheet multitool for discovering and arranging data

Language: Python

#20 in Command line interface
#5 in JSON
#53 in Python
jq 1.7 | Sep 2023
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I also find VisiData is useful for adhoc exploring of JSON data. You can also use it to explore multiple other formats. I find it really helpful, plus it gives that little burst of adrenaline from its responsive TUI, similar to fx and jless mentioned.

For my toolbox I include jq, gron, miller, VisiData, in addition to classics like sed, awk, and perl.

- https://github.com/saulpw/visidata - http://visidata.org/

Also there is a great introduction: - https://jsvine.github.io/intro-to-visidata/ "Intro to VisiData Tutorial" by Jeremy Singer-Vine
A command-line murder mystery (2014) | Jul 2023
The VisiData developers created a fun multi-part data wrangling puzzle last year called the Hanukkah of Data [1].

It is not specific to any tool, so you can use command line tools, the TUI data explorer VisiData[2] or whatever data tools you want to solve the puzzle in your terminal.

[1] https://hanukkah.bluebird.sh/5783/ [2] https://github.com/saulpw/visidata

Ask HN: I'm looking for some new spreadsheet software what are people using? | Dec 2022
If you are a command-line user, try visidata[0]

[0] https://github.com/saulpw/visidata

Ask HN: Local Tools for Viewing JSON | Mar 2022
I would add VisiData to that list. It is more suited for tabular data, but it can be used to explore large nested data. I find it is a good starting place to explore json data I'm not familiar with. I will also sometimes flatten the data with some general jq scripts or gron.

If I'm trying to understand some new json data, I start with visidata, and then I poke around to find the data I want. If it is data I want to extract again, I use jq to get the interesting bits. Sometimes I use that in combination with sqlite-utils to store that data so I can query it. (I haven't tried some of the other tools that will create a sqlite database for you.)

- https://github.com/saulpw/visidata - https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils

Gobang – Cross-platform TUI database management tool written in Rust | Sep 2021
see also: VisiData [1] - A terminal interface for exploring and arranging tabular data. VisiData supports tsv, csv, sqlite, json, xlsx (Excel), hdf5, and many other formats.

[1]: https://github.com/saulpw/visidata

SQLite-TUI: A TUI for viewing SQLite databases, written in Go | Sep 2021
Really cool, I’m a big user of SQLite. Reminds me of visidata but for SQLite: https://github.com/saulpw/visidata
What tools in your day to day give the largest productivity boost? | Mar 2021
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For interactive slicing and dicing of csv, xml, json, etc. I like VisiData. For scripting I like miller and jq. Not sure how that compares to your PS setup.

There are some recent Unix shells, like nushell for working with structured data, but I haven't used them.

  - https://github.com/saulpw/visidata
  - https://github.com/johnkerl/miller
  - https://github.com/nushell/nushell
How to Clean Text Data at the Command Line | Oct 2020
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Totally agree. I think mlr is a wonderful CLI tool. It is very robust, and can handle/convert multiple tabular formats including csv, tsv, json, fixed-format, etc. It has a pretty decent text output formatting, with the --opprint flag.

I use to be very comfortable using awk/sed/perl/sort/uniq/tr/tail/head from the CLI for the sort of data cleaning this article is talking about. However, over the past year I've found I use VisiData https://github.com/saulpw/visidata for interactive work.

If I need to clean up the data first, I'll use mlr or jq as input to Visidata. If my data is too dirty for mlr, then I'll use Unix toolbox tools mentioned as input to mlr, jq or VisiData.

VisiData provides some ability to script, but when possible I prefer to have the shell do the scripting with all the tools mentioned as input to Visidata.
Ask HN: Recommendations for Good TUI Libraries (Text User Interface)? | Sep 2020
I haven't used it but since it hasn't been mentioned, I recalled that Visidata's rendering library vdtui.py could be used for these tasks. They say so in their readme

https://github.com/saulpw/visidata

Helping newcomers become contributors to open projects | Oct 2019
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We would also welcome you with open arms at https://github.com/saulpw/visidata =) Send us an email, or join us on freenode, twitter, etc, if you want to help out! I would love to onboard you.
Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications? | Nov 2018
Just about every Rust cli app written by sharkdp:

    https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
    https://github.com/sharkdp/bat
    https://github.com/sharkdp/diskus
    https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine
For viewing csv's as tabular, paged data from the terminal, check out VisiData (python) https://github.com/saulpw/visidata
XSV: A fast CSV command-line toolkit written in Rust | Sep 2018
I like the pager UI of the VisiData utility, written in Python, for exploring data. Since XSV is written in Rust, it could theoretically be imported and used in VisiData.

https://github.com/saulpw/visidata

Ask HN: Data diff tool for tabular data? | Sep 2018
Not quite sure if it fits your needs exactly, but I've been pleasantly surprised with visidata's [0] capabilities when munging through csvs.

You can totally join two 'sheets' by primary key and save and replay that workflow, I think you may have to write a python function to iterate over the sets of columns to look for differences. Not sure if there's a cleaner way

[0] https://github.com/saulpw/visidata