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...

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.

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).

Related ongoing thread:

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

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

  today at 6:13 PM

  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

  • nomel

    today at 6:38 PM

    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

  today at 6:02 PM

  > 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

  today at 6:15 PM

  The first spreadsheets I remember were TUI (pccalc, Lotus 123)

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

• dang

  today at 7:38 PM

  That one is being discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47636456 - OP looks to have been a follow-up (which is great in principle but we downweight them for reasons described at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

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

• talideon

  today at 5:55 PM

  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

    today at 6:03 PM

    Agreed. Also for something this complex, performance isn't going to be automatically good enough I suspect.

• dafty4

  today at 5:55 PM

  Cool which newer TUI frameworks do you prefer?

  • aldanor

    today at 6:22 PM

    Rust's ratatui is pretty good on the lower-level side of things

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

  today at 6:02 PM

  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...

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

So... Visicalc?

Love vim stye editing

lots of bugs and crashes last time I tried it. Should see if it improved

Insane what people make these days, but its really cool!

• nomel

  today at 6:33 PM

  These days? There was a time before graphical user interfaces existed/were possible.

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

So Lotus 1-2-3

• talideon

  today at 5:57 PM

  But originating on Unix in '81, and thus predating Lotus 1-2-3 by ~2 years.

[dead]

[flagged]

• freedomben

  today at 4:38 PM

  > Very shitty software.

  To be even remotely constructive, you're going to need to be a little more specific.

• today at 4:34 PM