OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in New Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s always on the hunt for affordable geeky memorabilia.
Vast amounts of information, separated into logical rows and columns that add up to a V table, is the layman’s definition of a data set. We see such data sets everywhere, from the everchanging prices of consumer electronic goods to polling statistics, results of football matches, and more. With the right tool at your disposal, you can explore, clean, edit, summarise, analyse and plot the data into graphs for quick assimilation. While working with spreadsheets or CSV data is not traditionally envisioned as a task suited for the command line, VisiData will quickly dispel you of such notions.
Written in Python and released under the GPLv3, VisiData is incredibly fast and lightweight. You can easily use it to work with data sets featuring a few million rows of data. The project’s goal for future releases is to be able to handle hundreds of millions of rows of data.
For our money, one of best features is that it’s non-destructive. This means that it doesn’t alter your raw data by default, leaving you free to manipulate the data to best analyse it without fear of changing it in any fashion. In fact, it’s also possible to save a session so that your particular manipulations are recorded, and you can then restore the session without having to start again from scratch. All this and more
