Over the years, I’ve found delimited text files to be an easy way to store or output small amounts of data. Unlike SQL databases, XML, or a variety of other formats, they are human readable. Many of my applications and scripts generate these text tables, as do countless other applications. Often there is a header row and a couple of columns that would best be kept fixed while scrolling. One way to view such files is to pull them into a spreadsheet, parse them, and then split the screen. This is slow and clumsy, and updates are inconvenient to process. Instead, I wanted an application like the unix utility ‘less’ but with an awareness of table columns. The main requirements were that it be lightweight (i.e. keep minimal content in memory and start quickly), parse a variety of text file formats, provide easy synchronized scrolling of columns and rows, and allow horizontal motion by columns. Strangely, no such utility existed. Even Emacs and vi don’t provide an easy solution. So I wrote my own unix terminal application. I tried to keep the key mappings as true to “less” (and hence vi) as possible. The code is based on ncurses and fairly portable. The project is hosted on Google Code and is open source.

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