This looks beautiful, congrats! As an user though, it got me thinking - why should I learn this instead of good old excel? Is there an advantage in addition to not being MS/closed source?
VisiData is not a spreadsheet. If you need to do spreadsheet things, then you should definitely use Excel (or equivalent).
However, VisiData beats the pants off Excel for exploring and manipulating data for many reasons, including:
- Excel is cell-oriented, whereas VisiData operates on rows and columns.
- Excel can't deal with JSON (including API responses with nested objects), nor sqlite, nor GB csv files, nor the dozens of other formats VisiData supports (visidata.org/formats). Even the files on your filesystem.
- Faceted browsing (Shift+F) and many other powerful tools with only a single keystroke.
- VisiData takes advantage of the Python ecosystem and can easily be extended with Python.
Basically, if you can meet your data needs with Excel or Google Sheets, then sure, go ahead and do that. But when what you need to do is difficult or impossible in a spreadsheet, your alternative is to write a throwaway Python script or figure out the syntax for jq or xsv or sqlite or whatever. Chances are VisiData will let you do it much much faster, even if you have to look up every command. And now there's a handy menu system to make it even easier.
I stand corrected. Again, if Excel makes it easy to do some data task, then by all means, use it. I've been repeatedly frustrated by Excel's sluggishness, silent data mangling and truncation, and overall lack of ergonomics, so I prefer VisiData for the same tasks. Maybe someone can use Excel to flatten a JSON API response and save it as a markdown table in 5 seconds flat, but it's not me.
