
SC-IM – An ncurses spreadsheet program for the terminal - laktak
https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im
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tyingq
A few other terminal based spreadsheets:

Visidata [https://www.visidata.org/](https://www.visidata.org/)

Oleo [https://www.gnu.org/software/oleo/](https://www.gnu.org/software/oleo/)

Teapot
[https://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/](https://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/)

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jasonjayr
The original Lotus 1-2-3 was 'terminal' based too ....

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tyingq
Sure, and Visicalc before that, probably others.

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leejoramo
I believe that VisiCalc was the first to ship a functional spreadsheet. I
remember watching RichHarris’s “Rich Harris - Rethinking reactivity” video
introducing Svelte 3, and he discussed an earlier academic spreadsheet
concept.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao)

I used the following “terminal” spreadsheets

VisiCalc on a Radio Shack Model III

Microsoft MultiPlan on MS-DOS

Lotus 1-2-3 on MS-DOS

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jerrysievert
I first discovered sc by accident: sc was the "fast" abbreviation for "score"
on the MUDs I was working on at the time. made for an interesting shock and
great find once I realized what it was.

I still use sc sometimes, especially when I want super-easy computations in a
very small window without a ton of extra "chrome" getting in my way. it makes
layout math very easy and fast.

it made me smile seeing it, and seeing the grey link show up here on HN.

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watchdogtimer
I've been using sc for many years. As others have noted, it's lightweight and
fast. Some of it's unusual features are:

1\. Each cell can contain both a label and a value, so you don't need an extra
column to label numeric values.

2\. Cell editing is done using vi keybindings.

3\. Files are stored in a very readable, pure text format.

The biggest drawback of sc is there is no undo. If you delete something by
mistake, you can't bring it back. This is the biggest reason to choose SC-IM,
IMHO.

Unfortunately, the menu commands in SC-IM are not the same as the ones in sc,
which is a real problem on a keyboard-based spreadsheet and you have developed
sc muscle memory :(. SC-IM's help menu is also hard to read in narrow terminal
window, because it uses fixed-width line endings that cause every line to
improperly wrap. The fact that sc is included by default in most, if not all,
Linux distributions makes it so convenient to install and use I likely won't
ever change.

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DNied
Cool. I use original sc almost every day. Is this from the same code base?

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dividedbyzero
Genuinely curious, what reasons are there to use this instead of a GUI
spreadsheet application?

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uneekname
I'm not a fan of LibreCalc, and I don't know of many other GUI spreadsheet
programs for Linux. A terminal-based program is also attractive because it can
easily be scripted.

I once had to use sc-im because when I tried to open a ~very~ large file it
crashed all the GUI programs I tried.

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tssva
Gnumeric and Calligra Sheets are 2 other GUI spreadsheets for Linux. Calligra
is the name for what used to be the KOffice suite from the KDE project.

I can't speak to the usefulness of either especially since I have no idea what
your use case is.

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Jaruzel
Coming from a DOS background, this gave me nostalgia for Lotus-123.

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LeoPanthera
This pairs well with WordGrinder, a word processor (not text editor) for the
terminal.

[http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/](http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/)

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fiatjaf
Visidata isn't exactly a spreadsheet, but deserves a mention.

[https://www.visidata.org/](https://www.visidata.org/)

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ape4
SC original authors are James Gosling and Mark Weiser (!)

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29athrowaway
Remember Lotus 123? Quattro Pro?

There was a time where terminal spreadsheets was the regular way to work with
spreadsheets.

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0xdeadb00f
No really about the software itself but it's fantastic it uses regular 'ol
make (and it looks like it provides a BSD makefile too!).

I'm seeing more and more of what I feel are bloated and unnecessary build
systems, ninja, cmake, etc.

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simmons
I used sc back in the day for many light tasks. I had no idea that James
Gosling was an author. (Or didn't know who James Gosling was, at the time.)
It's great to see that it's being maintained in some form!

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SomeHacker44
I used Visicalc in the early 80s (maybe first around 1982). Reminds me of a
colorful version of that.

Did some awesome things with Visicalc and Wordperfect back in the 80s.

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kohtatsu
I absolutely adore sc(1) and enjoy whiling away time by crapping lovingly
hand-crafted data in it.

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ForOldHack
ncurses gives it arrow key navigation, this is cool. Every single distribution
needs this to run WITH disk partitioning software. EVERY.

As it is, I have to slipstream DOS box, and run as-easy-as... royal pain. Best
reason to run linux ever. ( besides the nifty tee shirts )

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lain98
Fun fact, the author of sc James Gosling went on to design the java
programming language.

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ngcc_hk
Nurses. Sadly. The other thread using python to do a II has more platform
because python And its Screen have more platform.

