tennis samplecsv.csv --vanilla
You can totally read CSV files in the terminal. After all, it’s a text file. You can use cat and then parse it with the column command.There is no Flatpak or Snap or other packages available for now.
That’s just my experience. You are free to explore on your system.
Table of Contents
Meet Tennis: CSV file viewing for terminal junkies
tennis samplecsv.csv -t "Personal List of Historically Significant Songs"
For example, there is a –peek flag, which is supposed to give an overview of the entire file, with the size, shape and other stats. A –zebra flag is supposed to give it an extra layer of alternated themed coloring. There are –reverse and –shuffle flags to change the order of rows, and –head and –tail flags to print the only first few or last few rows respectively. There are still more, but again, unfortunately, they do not work.tennis file.csv # basic view
tennis file.csv -n # row numbers
tennis file.csv -t "Title"
tennis file.csv -w 60
tennis file.csv --color off
I tried it on a large file
While a terminal lover find such tools attractive, it could also be helpful in cases where you are reviewing exported data from a script or you have to deal with csv files on servers.
Things you can do with Tennis
You can add a title to the printed CSV file on the terminal, with a -t argument, followed by a string that is the title itself:
Row numbering
tennis samplecsv.csv -w 60
tennis samplecsv.csv -n
Sometimes CSV files involve numbers that are long floats, being high precision with a lot of digits after a decimal point. While printing it out, if you don’t wish to see all of them, but only to a certain extent, you use the –digits flag:Doesn’t look like much at all in a terminal with the dark theme, which means it is indeed working! The accepted values are dark, light and auto (which again, gauges the theme based on your terminal colors).
Table width
So altogether, it is a good tool for printing your CSV files in an engaging way, to make them more pleasing to look at. If you try Tennis, don’t forget to share the experience in the comment section.
Changing the delimiter
Tennis can be installed in three different ways, one is to build from source (obviously), second to download the executable and place it in one of the directories in your PATH (which is the easiest one), and lastly using the brew command (which can indeed be easier if you have homebrew installed on your system). The instructions for all are listed here. I suggest getting the tar.gz file from the release page, extracting it and then using the provided executable in the extracted folder.
Color modes
In the vanilla mode, any sort of numerical formatting is abolished entirely from the printing of the CSV file. As you can see in the images above, rather annoyingly, the year appears with a comma after the first number because the CSV file is wrongly assuming that that is a common sort of number and not a year. But if I do it with the –vanilla flag:By default, as mentioned in the GitHub page, Tennis likes to be colorful. But you can change that, depending on the –color flag. It can be on, off or auto (which mostly means on).
Digits after decimal
📋You don’t necessarily need to customize it, as it automatically picks nice colors to match the terminal. As you can see, clean, solid borders and playful colors are visible right upfront.
Themes
Not all the features listed on the GitHub page work.
But a terminal dweller would prefer something that doesn’t force him to come out of the terminal.
Vanilla mode
While the features listed in the help page work really well, all the features listed on the website do not, and that discrepancy is a little disappointing, but something that we hope gets fixed in the future. Let me show you various styling options available in this tool.
Quick commands (you are more likley to use)
Some features listed on GitHub simply didn’t work in my testing, even after trying multiple installation methods.tennis samplecsv.csv --color off
Tennis usually picks the theme from the colors being used in the terminal to gauge if it is a dark or a light theme, but you can change that manually with the –theme flag. Since I have already been using the dark theme, let’s see what the light theme looks like:
Not everything worked as expected
You can enable the numbering of rows on Tennis using a simple -n flag at the end of the command:Tennis does that. Written in Zig, displays the CSV files gorgeously in a tabular way, with options for a lot of customization and stylization. I came across a tool that made CSV files look surprisingly beautiful in the terminal.
Getting started with Tennis
tennis samplecsv.csv -d +
You can set a maximum width to the entire table (useful if you want the CSV file not to occupy the entire width of the window). To do so, use the -w tag, followed by an integer that will display the maximum number of characters that you want the table to occupy.That works. No doubt. But it is hard to scan and certainly not easy to follow.
Final thoughts
tennis samplecsv.csv --digits 3
The default character that separates values in a CSV file is (obviously) a comma. But sometimes that isn’t the case with your file, and it could be another character like a semicolon or a $, it could pretty much be anything as long as the number of columns is the same for every row present. To print a CSV file with a “+” for a delimiter instead, the command would be:🚧Here’s the most frequently used options I found with Tennis:
