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A terminal spreadsheet editor with Vim keybindings

Details

External ID
47920289
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
A terminal spreadsheet editor with Vim keybindings
Website domain
github.com
Launched
April 27, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
126
Upvotes percentile
0.9151670951156813
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

While speccing out this spreadsheet tool, I realized that I never had to think about the keybindings. It all just came naturally from Vim. Normal/insert/visual modes, hjkl navigation, dd/yy/p, :w, :q. The usual muscle memory works.It supports CSV/TSV import and export, and a native .cell format that preserves formulas. The formula engine handles SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, MIN, MAX, and IF with range references.The codebase is a Cargo workspace: a pure cell-sheet-core library (no TUI dependency) and a cell-sheet-tui crate on top of ratatui. Early days, but it's usable.To try it out: cargo install cell-sheet-tuiFeedback of any kind is greatly appreciated!

Enrichment

Theme
spreadsheet and tabular data tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Dev tools
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
spreadsheet editor for the terminal with vim keys
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Yes A terminal spreadsheet with Vim keybindings can be quickly vibe-coded using standard TUI libraries like Ratatui or Bubbletea, combined with basic tabular data structures and CSV parsers.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: visidata - supports pipe-delimited files, stays running for faster searches, ironcalc - Rust-based Excel parity engine, sc-im - similar spreadsheet software written in C, Lotus 1-2-3 clone

Concerns raised: Does not support pipe-delimited files with embedded newlines (FDA format), Numerically unstable SUM/AVERAGE algorithms - should use Kahan summation, Keystroke doubling bug in Windows Terminal, Limited file format support - needs XLSX and ODS

Feature requests: Support for XLSX and ODS file formats, String equality operator for formulas like IF(A1=C3,A2,0), Vim-style fill operation with visual selection and anchor key, Vim plugin integration for .csv files, Scripting support with stable API

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 60 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #3 of 61 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 169 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.