Alternatives to xan
Analyze and transform CSV files through composable terminal commands. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
xan
Analyze and transform CSV files through composable terminal commands.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as xan.
qsv
Query, transform and validate tabular data from the terminal.
qsv offers a broad set of composable commands for querying, transforming and validating tabular data, though some features depend on build options and optional integrations.
csvkit
Suite of command line tools for converting and working with CSV files.
csvkit runs SQL queries against CSV with csvsql and converts Excel and JSON to CSV under the MIT license, but it is slow on very large files and quietly developed.
VisiData
An interactive terminal multitool for exploring, cleaning and converting tabular data in many formats.
VisiData swaps composable commands for an interactive keyboard-driven interface with histograms and many formats, but it needs WSL on Windows and some formats need extra Python packages.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
yq
Command-line processor for YAML, JSON, XML, CSV and TOML.
Dasel
Query and update structured files through a consistent command syntax.
jq
The command-line JSON processor: slice, filter, map and transform structured data the way sed and awk handle text.
csvlens
A command-line CSV viewer that works like less, with regex search and row and column filtering.
choose
A command-line tool for selecting fields from text, meant as a simpler alternative to cut and awk.
hck
A close replacement for the cut command that accepts regex delimiters and reorders output columns.
