oblong is a terminal-based tabular data editor written in Rust. It focuses on producing typed, rectangular, column-oriented tables ready to import into data science workflows in R, Python, Julia, etc. It is not a spreadsheet.
It features:
- Strictly rectangular, column-oriented tables
- Explicit column types (currently integer, float, text, or boolean)
- Modal, vim-like keyboard interface
- Fast, memory-safe performance even with large tables
oblong is not a spreadsheet program like LibreOffice Calc, Microsoft Excel, or Google Sheets. This type of software was originally designed for accountancy and, though widely used, they encourage a number of anti-patterns when used to prepare data for statistical analysis.
This means that oblong purposely does not support:
- Non-rectangular tables
- Row-oriented tables (variables as rows; observations as columns)
- Typeless or implicitly typed columns
- In-cell calculations or 'formulas'
- Cross-references between cells or tables
If you are looking for a terminal-based spreadsheet, try sc-im.