
VisiData Lightning Demo at PyCascades 2018 [video] - sgt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU
======
jsvine
I've been using VisiData for about nine months now, and have found it to be
_tremendously_ useful. These days, it's typically the first first tool I reach
for when examining/exploring a new dataset.

In fact, I've been liking it so much that I wrote a tutorial for first-time
users: [https://jsvine.github.io/intro-to-
visidata/](https://jsvine.github.io/intro-to-visidata/)

(Feedback very much welcome / appreciated.)

~~~
lucb1e
This is really great in helping me understand what I can do with it and how to
do it.

The lightning talk is a really great sales pitch, but it's unclear how to
actually replicate it. Another video of his, a recommended one after the
lightning talk, again loses me a little and goes very fast. I could pause and
try to understand... but it's not just about _how_ to do it, but also about
knowing that I should be looking to do certain things in the first place.

Your tutorial both gives a nice overview of what features exist, and explains
very clearly how to do things. Thanks for taking the time!

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aidos
I almost didn't bother because it was a video of someone messing with a csv
file, but I'm glad I took a few minutes out to watch that.

For everyone who hasn't watched it yet, from what I can tell, this is a clip
of someone using a terminal tool they've made for hacking around with tablular
data. It looks awesome for exploring data in a partially visual way, driven by
commands. I'll often end up doing a bunch of stuff like he demonstrates
directly in python — pull out the data, filter, find patterns, calculate new
columns. You could probably do much of that with Pandas, but this definitely
looks like it would be worth a play.

~~~
miles
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:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU&t=0m52s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU&t=0m52s)

------
SteveJS
Saul is the guy who uncovered the crossword plagiarism scandal
[http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-plagiarism-scandal-
is-...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-plagiarism-scandal-is-unfolding-
in-the-crossword-world/) VisiData is his vision of interactive data
exploration at the text terminal.

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stuartaxelowen
VisiData is indispensable for data engineering tasks. I've been `head -n 1000
mybigfile.csv | grep somerandomthing | etc | etc`ing for so long, it's ability
to give you fast summaries and exploration is such a breath of fresh air!

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TAForObvReasons
[http://visidata.org/](http://visidata.org/) is the page for the tool and
[https://github.com/saulpw/visidata](https://github.com/saulpw/visidata) is
the repo

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eikenberry
> removed support for .visidatarc in the current directory and via XDG; only
> $HOME/.visidatarc is used now;

That was an odd choice considering everything is moving the other way as a
standard. I wonder what the authors reasoning behind this decision was.

~~~
andor
Reducing complexity

[https://github.com/saulpw/visidata/issues/93](https://github.com/saulpw/visidata/issues/93)

------
dang
A thread about the product release is at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515310).
We merged some comments from that thread into this one because this one is
currently ranked higher. Also the demo seems to be communicating more about
what the project does than the project page.

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sgt
Apparently the guy took an entire year's sabbatical just to work on this tool.
Pretty impressive stuff.

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Glench
Going to plug my own research project which does some things like this in a
GUI:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q)

~~~
reallymental
Why on earth are blaring horns the first thing on your video?

It's an immediate 'close tab' motion for a lot of people.

Cut that part out and you'll have a lot more eyeballs on your product.

~~~
codezero
If you watch the rest of the video I think you’ll find they fit well with
their personality and the tone of the demo. I recommend the butts
visualization as evidence. Sounds like he’s also looking for anyone willing to
glend a hand in testing it out.

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lowsenberg
Very neat, especially useful for peaking into (SQLite) databases and getting a
quick overview of the contents. Thank you for your efforts!

------
est
I always read about how awesome VisCalc/Lotus1-2-3 is but never been able to
use one.

How does VisiData compare to them?

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ngould
Congrats, this is awesome!

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flas9sd
since v0.96 it can take input directly from stdin. I very much appreciated
that feature as now you can pipe output from mysql (--batch -e)/sqlite and the
likes. Would be interesting to use it as a pager inside the mysql prompt.

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_pmf_
Obligatory motivational video of Martin Shkreli using Excel:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545)

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dedosk
How does this handle plotting huge dataset? E.g. 500000 points?

Is Windows version somewhat on the roadmap? E.g. For mingw-bash or cygwin?

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simonhughes22
What does this give you that pandas lacks? Or is it more geared towards people
that like to use the terminal?

~~~
azag0
I don't really see why those two should be compared? Pandas is a Python
library for programmatic work with tabular data. Visidata gives you a live
view of a file storing tabular data.

~~~
simonhughes22
Thanks for clarifying, that makes sense

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ginsmar
Wonderful tool. Thank you!

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scarnie
Brilliant work!

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IshKebab
Pretty cool but ... why not use a GUI? It would make it 100 times easier to
use. He even says at one point "this is all just in the terminal by the way"
like that's a _good_ thing!

~~~
llao
What they showed in the lightning demo is so much better done with fast
keystrokes than moving a mouse around. I can't wait to try this tool, it will
save me days of time per year.

~~~
zokier
GUI does not imply mouse-based.

