Related ongoing thread:

Sheets: Terminal based spreadsheet tool - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47636456 - April 2026 (46 comments)

This could just be a skill or wrong use case thing, but do you only use spreadsheets for pure number-crunching? I've played terminal spreadsheets, mostly sc-im, but I often have some longform text field (like 'Notes') that becomes more fiddly to deal with than a GUI.

Visidata is the only terminal program I've found that handles large text fields in tabular data nicely the way you can drill down into a table row, then Ctrl+O to edit a field in your editor, but it's not a spreadsheet.

A modern launch of a similar tool: https://github.com/maaslalani/sheets

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...

But why?

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).

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.

See also visidata for an alternative https://www.visidata.org/

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.

I love this but with all the advances of TUI frameworks, using C + ncurses feels like such a hard path.

Love vim stye editing