Tass

A pager for tabular data

It's like less, but for CSV! It looks like this:

Installing

If you already have rust, you can install tass like this:

$ cargo install tass

Usage

You can pass a filename, or pipe data to stdin:

$ tass mydata.csv $ cat mydata.csv | tass

Key | Action --------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------- Up/j, PageUp | Move up one row, page Down/k,PageDown | Move down one row, page Left/h | Move left one column Right/l | Move right one column Home, End | Move to start/end of file number g | Move to line $number f | Move to end and auto-scroll as new rows come in /, ? | Search, reverse-search for string n, N | Jump to next, previous match q/Esc | Quit

Comparison to other tools

Tool | Functionality | Filetypes | Streaming | File size ---------------------------------|----------------------------------------------|--------------------|-----------|------------------------------------ tass | Viewing data, basic searching and filtering | CSV | yes | Large (bigger than memory is fine) [VisiData] | As above, plus: summary stats, plots, ... | CSV, JSON, ... | yes | Medium (up to perhaps 50% of memory) Excel/Calc/Numbers/Google Sheets | As above, plus: it's a spreadsheet | CSV, xls, ods, ... | no | Small (1M row limit)

My advice is to use the most featureful tool you can get away with. However, if you are cursed with multi-gigabyte CSV files, then here are some tips:

• If you want to see summary statistics but don't care about the underlying data itself, you can still use VisiData/Excel/etc.: just downsample it first with [xsv]. This will reduce the precision of your stats and plots, but not the overall shape (probably).
• If you do want exact answers to complex questions, consider converting your CSV file to a sqlite database.
• Alternatively, take a look at [frawk] - it's really nice.