Saul Pwanson
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2018–2025
4:51 · 41K views · Jan 25, 2018
A five-minute lightning demo of VisiData, a terminal tool for exploring and manipulating data. It uses two months of NYC 311 complaint data to drill down, plot points on a virtual map and save selected rows.
HN recommends it as the fastest way to understand what VisiData can do, since seeing it work is clearer than reading about it.
11 comments from Hacker News
Highly recommend this as well, it has been a godsend for me for digging into multi-GB Cloudfront log files and extracting stats and patterns. There is a good (albeit a bit old now, as the interface has been overhauled since) quick demo video from VD's creator : this video
visdata is pretty mind-blowing...at least, that's how i felt when i saw the demo the first time: this video
Not sure about saving but, more importantly for me, it can read sqlite DBs, which has been a godsend whenever I need to take a quick glance at some random DB just to see what kind of tables it holds and what does the data look like. I know my SELECTs but I can't, for the life of me, remember what are the commands to check schemas and DB metadata on sqlite ("Was it .describe? Maybe .schema? Or perhaps \t? Gah, let's check the help once again..."), so knowing that visidata gets me there much faster feels good. > Also looks powerful in it's own right If you aren't convinced of that yet, I'd simply suggest to take a look at this lightning demo (~5 mins): this video
If you aren't familiar with Visidata, this video gives a pretty good idea of what it can do: this video It seems like making a living on shell tools can be difficult to impossible. The author Saul is using Patreon to help fund his work on this tool. I love this tool, and hope others can help support him too. Maybe this "duo-repo" approach will allow him to do this full time.
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: this video