MtCellEdit – Lightweight Spreadsheet Program

[ravetcofx]

For something even more lightweight with GUI, Nebu, written in uxntal https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/nebu.html

[flarzzarp]

That entire website is a deep, deep rabbit hole and I absolutely love it. Thanks for sharing!

[mcejp]

> Over the years I have been frustrated by binary and XML formats that make data only accessible via a single program (or by me wasting time manually converting each file, or by me writing a file format conversion program).

For me, the frustration is version control. Native spreadsheet formats (xlsx/ods) are binary, so un-diffable. Plaintext formats like CSV/TSV play nice with Git, but come at a high cost in ergonomics: there is no way to preserve formatting such as column widths and formulas are usually discarded on save. Moreover, Excel/Calc don't really like it when you overwrite an open file from another program.

MtCellEdit seems to be a step in the right direction, but still leaves a good part of the itch unscratched.

[cartesius13]

Great tool, good job to the author. I am looking for something almost exactly like this. Lightweight GUI app for viewing tabular data. There's only one critical thing missing for this to be perfect for my desired workflow and that is automatically reloading on external file changes. Currently I use Visidata for the purposes of viewing the output of sqlite.

I write an SQL (or mainly PRQL these days) query on a text editor on a file which is being watched by entr which runs the query on a sqlite database which outputs a csv file which is then read by visidata and there I look at the data, do some basic manipulations. That my very simple, completely unix-style data exploration pipeline. What I miss a bit from Visidata is a bit more mouse control. I mainly want to select a range of cells to copy and paste somewhere else, which this does. But unfortunately this doesn't reload the file on change automatically.

Anyone has any recommendations for a data tool that would fit the workflow I described?

[igtztorrero]

"I created from scratch" love these words...

18 years of creativity, awesome.

[bkyan]

Is there an opportunity to bring something like this online using wasm?

[pmarreck]

For any csv commandline commandos out there, I recently discovered frawk https://github.com/ezrosent/frawk which is like awk but natively understands csv and is rewritten in Rust for quite the speed improvement

[anthk]

>the speed

Check mawk and awka.

[soheilpro]

Is there anything similar for macOS?

[cyberge99]

This would be a killer app and one I would gladly pay for.

[bloopernova]

https://web.archive.org/web/20240502195544/https://ced.markt...

[steanne]

of mtpaint fame? i use that all the time.

[Mr_Minderbinder]

Yes, it is by the same developer. I use mtPaint as my main graphics editor as well, I have not needed anything bigger yet.

[jsdwarf]

What does MtCellEdit set apart from the standard spreadsheet program apart from its lightweightness? Any special features?

[krudnicki]

Probably using CSV data format which is great. Can be used for example in Obsidian.

[kemayo]

By the look of it, I think the answer has to be "no, and that's that point".

[Narishma]

The misaligned menu bar text in the screenshots is triggering me.

[pdyc]

shameless plug, if you want to view csv with charts you can also give my free viewer a try https://newbeelearn.com/tools/csvonline

[leeoniya]

is it OSS?

what do you use for parsing?

[mharig]

For the non-GUI guys there is visidata.

https://www.visidata.org/

[anthk]

sc-im it's a true spreadsheet and with gnuplot you can do plots and charts.

[wodenokoto]

That is not even close to being a spreadsheet.

[Gys]

A little off topic but I am looking for a lightweight word processor program. For MacOS. One that can edit docx documents with some minimal features. Most word processors like LibreOffice are very bloated.

[diegof79]

You should try Pages. The Apple office apps -Pages, Numbers, and Keynote- are often overlooked, but they can edit simple docx, xlsx, and pptx files.

For example, Pages can also serve as a basic desktop publishing software as it supports page layouts with text box flow, and Numbers has the best spreadsheet UI that I’ve used (why any other spreadsheet software doesn’t allow to handle “floating” spreadsheets as Numbers? Once you use it is so evident and natural).

[tgv]

I'm partial to Mellel. It's pretty snappy. It has a different approach to styles, though, which gives it a bit of a learning curve, but it feels very direct.

https://www.mellel.com/

[Brajeshwar]

Have you tried Pages that come free with macOS? I find it to be pretty capable.

[pcl]

How do you measure weight? Apple’s Pages app works on macOS, can edit docx files, and has some minimal features.

[phonon]

You can try WPS Office....

[nnurmanov]

How does it store data? Is it some nosql database that stores cells?

[nnurmanov]

Sorry about this comment, I read the post, it is a TSV file where the data is stored. I have been researching AirTable alternatives and I somehow thought there was an underlying database. My fault

[andrea76]

It's written in the website. Read the 3rd paragraph for all information you need.

[zie]

Seriously go read the link and answer your own question. It's literally there on the linked page.

I mean if the linked page didn't include the information, sure asking is fine.