Alternatives to VisiData
An interactive terminal multitool for exploring, cleaning and converting tabular data in many formats. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
VisiData
An interactive terminal multitool for exploring, cleaning and converting tabular data in many formats.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as VisiData.
csvlens
A command-line CSV viewer that works like less, with regex search and row and column filtering.
csvlens is a less-style CSV viewer with regex search and filters, but it only views CSV files and cannot edit, clean or convert other formats.
qsv
Query, transform and validate tabular data from the terminal.
qsv replaces the interactive interface with composable commands for querying, transforming and validating tabular data, and it runs natively on Windows without needing WSL.
xan
Analyze and transform CSV files through composable terminal commands.
xan works through composable terminal commands and an expression language for CSV files rather than an interactive spreadsheet view, and it has native Windows builds.
csvkit
Suite of command line tools for converting and working with CSV files.
csvkit is a suite of separate commands that can run SQL against CSV and convert Excel or JSON, but it has no interactive view and is slow on very large files.
Also worth comparing
These listings name VisiData as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
Tad
A desktop viewer for CSV and Parquet files and SQLite and DuckDB databases, with pivot tables.
VisiData explores CSV, JSON, Excel and SQLite data in the terminal under GPL-3.0 with histograms, but needs WSL on Windows and uses keyboard commands.
trdsql
Query structured files with SQL from the command line.
VisiData explores and converts tabular files interactively in the terminal rather than through SQL queries, and needs WSL on Windows.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
sq
An open-source command-line tool to inspect, query, join, import and export data across databases and files.
Harlequin
A SQL IDE that runs in the terminal, with adapters for DuckDB, SQLite, Postgres and more.
jless
Browse large JSON structures in a keyboard-driven terminal viewer.
fx
Inspect JSON interactively from your terminal.
Dasel
Query and update structured files through a consistent command syntax.
LiteCLI
A command-line SQLite client with auto-completion and syntax highlighting.
