6 HN users recommended this demo6 months2018–2025score 7
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN recommends it as the fastest way to understand what VisiData can do, since seeing it work is clearer than reading about it.
A five-minute lightning demo of VisiData, a terminal tool for exploring and manipulating data. It uses two months of NYC 311 complaint data to drill down, plot points on a virtual map and save selected rows.
“visdata is pretty mind-blowing...at least, that's how i felt when i saw the demo the first time” (HN, 2021)
Highly recommend this as well, it has been a godsend for me for digging into multi-GB Cloudfront log files and extracting stats and patterns. There is a good (albeit a bit old now, as the interface has been overhauled since) quick demo video from VD's creator : [this video]
Thanks for your comment - I wouldn't have clicked on the video link otherwise, and it was well worth it. For others who usually skip videos, here is a link which skips the intro, getting your time investment to under 4 minutes: [this video]
The "video demo" is pretty buried in the site, here it is for your enjoyment. Like most viz, seeing it in action makes it much clearer than reading about it. [this video]
Not sure about saving but, more importantly for me, it can read sqlite DBs, which has been a godsend whenever I need to take a quick glance at some random DB just to see what kind of tables it holds and what does the data look like. I know my SELECTs but I can't, for the life of me, remember what are the commands to check schemas and DB metadata on sqlite ("Was it .describe? Maybe .schema? Or perhaps \t? Gah, let's check the help once again..."), so knowing that visidata gets me there much faster feels good. > Also looks powerful in it's own right If you aren't convinced of that yet, I'd simply suggest to take a look at this lightning demo (~5 mins): [this video]
If you aren't familiar with Visidata, this video gives a pretty good idea of what it can do: [this video] It seems like making a living on shell tools can be difficult to impossible. The author Saul is using Patreon to help fund his work on this tool. I love this tool, and hope others can help support him too. Maybe this "duo-repo" approach will allow him to do this full time.
The section "TUI : Text-based User Interfaces" resonates with me strongly, and is somewhat relevant to the WTF thread[1] from yesterday, in particular this subthread[2] about GUI vs TUI. Compare the statements: > terminal protocols are ghastly display server protocols in disguise vs > > At what point do we just say why not 'install a modern GUI'? > I have yet to see a modern GUI that didn't put pretty little animations a higher priority than being modular and configurable and having as much or as little data density as I desire > Command lines[3], on the other hand, do it natively if not intuitively. Which brings up few interesting observations: * Terminal vs graphical is almost completely orthogonal and an implementation detail. There are plenty of WIMPy style[4] TUI/ncurses applications, and also various forms of commandlines/repls that are natively graphical. * I'd argue that there are few other categories that are less often recognized, namely "keystroke-driven" and "web style" (nomenclature is mine and not fully though out). * The characteristic attributes of "keystroke-driven" is full interactivity (in contrast to command-line) but where typically there are no (or minimal) interactive elements on-screen. Some examples off my head would be VisiData[5], tdo[6], fman[7]. These types of applications tend to have very high data densities (what the commenter above desired) * "Web style" applications is more ambiguous (and debatable) category, but I think there is a distinctio
VisiData as example of keystroke-driven, data-dense applications.
Chrome debugger tools? htop? visidata [1]? Clicker games are interesting in that they start bare and end up filling the screen with controls. Rerun visualizations come to mind too [2]. -- 1: [this video] 2: [link]
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