March 10, 2021

VisiData

https://www.visidata.org/ is a Swiss Army Knife for viewing, querying, filtering, summarizing, and converting a very wide array of data types. It comes with a bunch of standard data format support like CSV. Just looking at the file types makes me happy, because it includes geospatial too.

Get started with python is easy.

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pip3 install visidata 
pip3 install pyshp # geospatial support
asdf reshim python

The asdf... part is needed because I’m using asdf these days.

Then read this great tutorial.

Now point at a SQLite database with dv training.db:

Or open a shapefile dv some-shape-file.shp which is the CSV of spatial data:

In this case I’ve tagged two columns by typing ! so that I can sort by them using [ and ]. But even better, I can use those key columns for quick summary statistics using Shift-F:

And adding data types to the columns is easy too: just select a column and type % for Date, and so on.

But what really blew my mind was the ability to select a row and type . (period) to get a preview of the feature…in a terminal window!

See Also

• asdf for Runtime Management
• UML in a nutshell