Wow, the project homepage has a great dynamic command-line generator that lets you specify what you are trying to do. This may exist elsewhere, but it's the first time I've seen it and I hope to see it on more projects! https://www.visidata.org/
I've been living in vd for the last few months for data analysis. It's been beyond helpful, including for examining ugly nested JSON data. It's been extremely valuable for feature exploration in my dataset.
Looks like it can save to sqlite? Seems like a very good companion in that case. I often analyze csv files in sqlite but importing data to it can sometimes be a bit of work. If I can use VisiData as an intermediary step, it seems very useful. Also looks powerful in it's own right.
Not sure about saving but, more importantly for me, it can read sqlite DBs, which has been a godsend whenever I need to take a quick glance at some random DB just to see what kind of tables it holds and what does the data look like. I know my SELECTs but I can't, for the life of me, remember what are the commands to check schemas and DB metadata on sqlite ("Was it .describe? Maybe .schema? Or perhaps \t? Gah, let's check the help once again..."), so knowing that visidata gets me there much faster feels good.
I just confirmed while testing vd, it does save to sqlite (select cols/rows, ctrl-s to save, name your file something.sqlite, done!) That's really awesome.
I might write a plugin [0] to load logged FIX [1] messages (an ascii-based, industry standard format for communicating financial transactions)
Hey, VisiData author here! If you do want to make a FIX loader (or any plugin), you can come chat with us on Freenode #visidata and we'd love to help. A straightforward row-based file format should be quite straightforward to make a loader for!
vd is so useful for browsing sqlite, csv, parquet, etc data. I just wish I used it often enough to remember how to use all the advanced features like selecting column and row subsets
That over there blew my mind, and I had to go back to the page to double-check that. And indeed, it's all clever CSS trickery. Digging further into the source, I found that this was generated using the ansi2html [1] library which I had never heard about before. Thanks for the TIL!
This is great, thanks for sharing it! In the last week I searched for (a) a table-view UI for rec files, and (b) a text-file based spreadsheet program allowing simple formulas. Now I get both of those from a single HN post!
