Show HN: Visual, local-first data tool(columns.dev)

4 pointsby rafferty977 ay önce2 comments

https://columns.dev/

I've spent the past two years building an app for quick, ad-hoc data manipulation because I was dissatisfied with the existing landscape of tools. I thought others might find it useful too, so I'm throwing it out into the world.

Currently, if you want to grab some CSV or JSON data and do a sequence of operations on it (filter, sort, aggregate, etc.), the path of least resistance is to open an IDE or notebook and write code. This is fine for simple tasks, but can get messy quickly and doesn't offer the same immediate visual feedback loop that something like a spreadsheet does.

I thought there ought to exist a tool that offers a similar UX to a spreadsheet but with the power of a dataframe library, so I built one.

There's no signup and it runs entirely within the browser, using Rust compiled to WebAssembly for the data processing and Solid.JS for the UI. Projects are persisted to IndexedDB and files are read directly from disk using the file system API, so nothing sensitive ever leaves your computer.

I know documentation is currently scarce, but if there's enough interest, I'm happy to work on this.

Any questions or feedback are of course welcome. I'm just curious whether anyone would actually find this tool useful.

2 comments

mattewong7 ay önce

Looks interesting and I gave it a whirl-- thank you. Your intro mentions filter + sort, but I couldn't find a way to do that in the web UI (maybe that's just my ineptitude).

Re your question whether it would be useful: hard to answer because I cannot tell right now whether it solves (or intends to solve) any specific problem better than plenty of other alternatives.

youchen_7 ay önce

This is a really interesting approach to data manipulation! Local-first tools are becoming increasingly important, and the visual feedback loop you describe sounds very intuitive. The fact that it runs entirely in the browser with no server dependency is a huge plus. Looking forward to seeing how this evolves!