Terminal Spreadsheets

A spreadsheet in the terminal is the familiar grid of cells, formulas and references, driven from the keyboard. The form goes back to VisiCalc in 1979 and arrived on Unix as sc, whose vi style key bindings most terminal spreadsheets still follow.

 

They read and write CSV, TSV and Excel files, recalculate as you type, and open exports large enough to stall a desktop application. Analysts and administrators use them to check a data file on the server that produced it, without copying it to a workstation first.

 

Below is a list of terminal spreadsheets.