Sc-im: Spreadsheets in your terminal
72 points
2 hours ago
| 8 comments
| github.com
| HN
freedomben
2 hours ago
[-]
I tried this out when it was mentioned a few weeks ago[1].

It's pretty neat but does have a number of bugs. The packaged version also doesn't have xls support compiled in (at least on Fedora) which is unfortunate, though building is fairly easy[2].

I love the idea of it though, so I'm really hoping these issues get ironed out! I'm happy to help contribute if maintainers are willing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457009

[2] https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im/wiki/Building-sc%E2%80...

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dodomodo
1 hour ago
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I think spreadsheets are a greater example of something that require the subtleties of an actual GUI. This is most obvious with the various plots which are hilariously imprecise. But the advantages of GUI are also present when just using the spreadsheet itself, it's ability to convey the skeuomorphic two dimensional space is much greater.

And it's not like the terminal can't be a greater data processing tool, but you have to use different paradigms.

Still from an esthetical perspective I love those simple TUI interfaces. They invoke a weird sense of comfort in me that I can't fully explain.

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akavel
28 minutes ago
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Lol, young padawan, check up those weird old programs that were called "VisiCalc" and "Lotus 1-2-3".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3

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nomel
3 minutes ago
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Which were before GUI of any complexity were possible. There was no alternative at the time.
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freedomben
39 minutes ago
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> I think spreadsheets are a greater example of something that require the subtleties of an actual GUI

I've been wondering about this too. I think a great TUI could get it done though, but it remains to be seen how it could really stack up. If I didn't have so many projects already, I'd give this a shot because I would really love a "vim" for spreadsheets

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dmarinus
25 minutes ago
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The first spreadsheets I remember were TUI (pccalc, Lotus 123)
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w4zz
12 minutes ago
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Insane what people make these days, but its really cool!
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nomel
8 minutes ago
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These days? There was a time before graphical user interfaces existed.

1979: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

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chadrs
53 minutes ago
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I love this but with all the advances of TUI frameworks, using C + ncurses feels like such a hard path.
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talideon
46 minutes ago
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It's a tool with a long vintage, and it wouldn't make sense to port it to a different language just to take advantage of the likes of bubbletea or textual.
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freedomben
38 minutes ago
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Agreed. Also for something this complex, performance isn't going to be automatically good enough I suspect.
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dafty4
46 minutes ago
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Cool which newer TUI frameworks do you prefer?
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aldanor
19 minutes ago
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Rust's ratatui is pretty good on the lower-level side of things
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thesuitonym
1 hour ago
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I'd love if this had support for saving as xlsx. Being able to open them is nice, but it would be great if I could collaborate with MS Office users without them ever knowing.
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freedomben
39 minutes ago
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It does. It's not compiled in to the package repos though, so you might have to build it yourself[1]. It's also a bit buggy currently.

[1]: https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im/wiki/Building-sc%E2%80...

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nickandbro
45 minutes ago
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Love vim stye editing
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vrighter
28 minutes ago
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lots of bugs and crashes last time I tried it. Should see if it improved
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drumhead
2 hours ago
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So Lotus 1-2-3
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talideon
43 minutes ago
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But originating on Unix in '81, and thus predating Lotus 1-2-3 by ~2 years.
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