
Show HN: TablePad, a notepad app for structured data - arch_deluxe
https://tablepad.app/
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arch_deluxe
Author's note:

Everyone uses spreadsheets to manage small-scale tabular data because unlike a
database they're usable by humans and let users immediately start entering
data, but they’re not great at “staying out of your way”, in that you
constantly have to resize columns to match the data width, style the header
row separately and freeze it, maybe add a row count column, remember to sort
columns in such a way that row integrity is preserved, etc. Doing that stuff
drives me crazy. Also, launching a giant office application to manage a list
of a couple dozen items feels silly. Or doing something in the cloud. It feels
simultaneously like massive overkill yet still not having the right tool for
the job, like using a Ferrari to haul lumber.

So out of pent-up frustration I built a simple free desktop app for editing
tables that lets you just start typing like a spreadsheet, but actually knows
what a table is and tries really hard to stay out of your way. So you can just
edit your table rather than spending your time teaching an automatic infinite
ledger how to be a tabular notepad. I’ve enjoyed having it in my toolbox so I
thought I’d put it out there to see if anyone else finds it useful.

In the spirit of Show HN, this project is somewhere between a prototype and an
MVP; there are obvious major missing features but it’s actively used by enough
people that the quality isn’t terrible. If you have a use case for which you
think TablePad is a good fit, I'd love to hear about it in the comments or you
can email me at seth@tablepad.app.

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makesthingspos
Nice app.

Features to consider: 1) F2 for editing cell contents 2) tab behavior like
Excel where pressing tab on last column wraps to the next line+first column 3)
C-; to enter current date.

I did get this error when trying to save or save as on Linux.

[https://i.imgur.com/0VmWKGw.png](https://i.imgur.com/0VmWKGw.png)

I was using file name: "New Table". I did not enter a file extension. I'm not
sure what extension TablePad uses.

~~~
arch_deluxe
Thanks very much for the feedback and bug report, which I have reproduced on
Ubuntu. I'll fix the bug shortly and put the feature requests on the list.

Edit: fixed in 0.5.20

