This feels like the kind of domain in particular where the advantages of a GUI provide a superior experience, and once it gets sophisticated enough you'll have basically built one anyway just in the terminal.
I used blocky spreadsheets a few decades ago... Tell me why I want to use them again today?
Legit question - I want to understand the needs I'm overlooking which this thing meets. (Please don't just reply "lack of ribbon/ads/bloat etc", none of that nonsense is required in either flavor).
freedomben 3 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.
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.
akavel 1 hours ago [-]
Lol, young padawan, check up those weird old programs that were called "VisiCalc" and "Lotus 1-2-3".
Which were before GUI of any complexity were possible. There was no alternative at the time.
Related, see the insane success and excitement from the early GUI based operating systems.
freedomben 1 hours ago [-]
> 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
dmarinus 59 minutes ago [-]
The first spreadsheets I remember were TUI (pccalc, Lotus 123)
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.
freedomben 1 hours ago [-]
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.
I love this but with all the advances of TUI frameworks, using C + ncurses feels like such a hard path.
talideon 1 hours ago [-]
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.
freedomben 1 hours ago [-]
Agreed. Also for something this complex, performance isn't going to be automatically good enough I suspect.
dafty4 1 hours ago [-]
Cool which newer TUI frameworks do you prefer?
aldanor 53 minutes ago [-]
Rust's ratatui is pretty good on the lower-level side of things
nickandbro 1 hours ago [-]
Love vim stye editing
w4zz 46 minutes ago [-]
Insane what people make these days, but its really cool!
nomel 42 minutes ago [-]
These days? There was a time before graphical user interfaces existed/were possible.
This feels like the kind of domain in particular where the advantages of a GUI provide a superior experience, and once it gets sophisticated enough you'll have basically built one anyway just in the terminal.
I used blocky spreadsheets a few decades ago... Tell me why I want to use them again today?
Legit question - I want to understand the needs I'm overlooking which this thing meets. (Please don't just reply "lack of ribbon/ads/bloat etc", none of that nonsense is required in either flavor).
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...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3
Related, see the insane success and excitement from the early GUI based operating systems.
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
[1]: https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im/wiki/Building-sc%E2%80...
1979: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc
To be even remotely constructive, you're going to need to be a little more specific.