I linked in this thread, and Matt replied above in this thread, but we charge companies making >$100M in revenue for using Nobie to provide a service to users, or for using it to help train models.
We've gone through a bunch of iterations. One of those iterations was canvas, but we care a lot about the user experience, and found getting the frame times we wanted on huge workbooks wasn't practical, so we graduated to webgpu/webgl, and that was better, but we kept hitting bugs in the web rendering engines that we couldn't tolerate, so now we've ended up going down to the metal and writing an engine on top of metal/vulkan/opengl (we still have a webgpu/webgl backend, but we're not using it at the moment).
You didn't ask a specific question, but it basically comes down to getting really good at calculating layout fast, getting good at figuring out how to incrementally maintain your rendered view, then getting really good at figuring out how to optimally use the hardware you're targeting.
Yes, you can print an xlsx to PDF as excel would if you printed the same file (respecting whatever print layout has been done in excel). It'll be vectorized, so you have infinite resolution on zoom for text.
We do not yet support editing print layout, so you can't adjust the pagination / change the page size in / with Nobie yet, but that will come soon :)
I hope you try Nobie out. We've put a lot of effort into making sure its a great experience.
We're a native app, so you should expect a reasonable app size, 120fps, fast (correct) calcs, all the keyboard shortcuts from Excel, and a pretty UI.
If you're an LLM person, we ship a pretty good MCP, so you can just tell claude/codex to work on the file, and it'll open nobie and update it in front of you (if you use our embedded terminal, you get fancy hooks and context injection from the workbook to make the LLMs smarter, otherwise we have tools that provide some useful context to agents)
We fully support the formula language, and workbook semantics.
The main deficiency we have right now is not letting people create / edit pivot tables. We support what-if scenario analysis, conditional formatting, cycles, lambdas, arrays, spills, lets, etc.
- We had a bet internally about how long it'd take for someone to complain about default number styles, we'll get this in by tomorrow
- CSV import can be done today either by using claude / codex and telling them to load the CSV into nobie (we install an MCP on first boot of the app, and we have a really nice built-in terminal, you can click the claude / codex buttons in the top button bar to launch them), or using the CLI. We're working on a GUI workflow for it, but CSV is a cursed format, so we want to do it better than Excel
- We can render pixel perfect PNGs and PDFs (native vectorized PDFs)
- You can pass an xlsx, inputs, and output cells, and get a JSON API from any excel workbook
- You can pipe a postgres query into an xlsx file, and then run excel formulas over it
- You can pretty easily setup a `git diff` helper for xlsx files that shows you the changes you care about
- We have a built-in terminal, auto-launchers for Claude and Codex (with some fancy hooks that inject context when you send messages) and a pretty good MCP. After you install Nobie you're agents can do pretty much anything in an xlsx. We also provide a lot of tools that give agents high-signal information about the workbook, so they can quickly get up to speed and do good work
- You can programmatically edit workbooks in pleasant ways, and the workbook will update properly, AND recalc incrementally, AND the numbers will tie with Excel (if they don't definitely let us know, but we've put a huge amount of work into making sure they do)
- There's a bunch of examples on the CLI page on the website, but a lot of previously impossible/very hard things are now pretty trivial with our CLI, and I think this'll be really useful for for a lot of devs (the CLI will be getting better throughout this week, I have a lot more stuff I want to do with this)
- Happy to talk technical details. Everything is from scratch, and our render and calc engines have been a massive amount of work.
I'm one of the engineers on the team. We're really excited to be putting this out into the world. There's a massive amount of functionality in this thing that we're hoping will make the lives of everyone who needs to work with xlsx files better. Both programmatically and with a GUI.
See https://nobie.com/cli for the dev focused aspects, but I'm really proud of this thing, and happy that most people will be able to use it for free.
Has anyone who's enjoying Jujutsu tried Meta's Sapling? I've been using it lately with the VS Code plugin, and it's been great. My understanding is that Jujutsu is pretty heavily inspired by Sapling and Google's patch-based git workflow?
- Delete `/usr/local/bin/nobie`
- If you're on mac, you also need to delete the .app from `/Applications`