TableSkim

TableSkim is a lightweight, fast viewer for tabular files. Open a large CSV, an Excel workbook, a Parquet or JSON file or a DuckDB / SQLite database and start scrolling immediately: rows are loaded in the background while the window stays responsive.

Features

• CSV / TSV and Excel (.xlsx, .xlsm) files, including workbooks with multiple sheets
• CSV / TSV compressed with gzip, bzip2, xz or zstd (e.g. data.csv.gz) are decompressed on the fly
• CSV / TSV in UTF-8 (with or without a BOM), UTF-16 (with or without a BOM) and Shift_JIS (CP932, as written by Japanese Excel); the encoding is detected and can be changed from View → Text Encoding
• Parquet files and DuckDB / SQLite databases (every table and view is shown as a sheet); sorting and filtering run inside the database, so they work on tables of any size
• JSON files: an array of objects or one object per line (NDJSON / JSON Lines, .ndjson, .jsonl), also gzip- or zstd-compressed; object keys become columns, and nested objects and arrays are shown as text
• SQL on DuckDB, SQLite, Parquet and JSON files (Edit → Run SQL..., : in the terminal UI); a query is shown as a sheet. SQL that was run is kept in a history shared by all windows and sessions (History, Ctrl+Up / Ctrl+Down; Up / Down), and Tab completes table and column names and keywords
• Filters on any number of columns (Edit → Filter..., f in the terminal UI) that compare by type: numbers numerically, dates by day or time (= 2024-01-31 matches any time that day, also in date text), and booleans as TRUE / FALSE; matches takes a regular expression
• Column statistics (Edit → Column Statistics or right-click a column; S in the terminal UI): row, empty and distinct counts, min / max, sum, mean and standard deviation, and the most frequent values, over the filtered rows; double-click a value to filter by it
• Histograms (Edit → Histogram... or right-click a column; B in the terminal UI) of numbers and dates in bins of round widths (whole days, months, years, ...), or of the most frequent values of other columns, in a window of their own; double-click a bar (Enter) to filter the sheet to its rows, and the histogram follows
• Scatter plots and 2D density of two columns (Edit → Scatter Plot...; the density with M in the terminal UI), with the correlation coefficient and the least-squares line; with text on X, box plots of each category. Histograms and plots can be saved as PNG or SVG images
• Group By (Edit → Group By...; A in the terminal UI): count the rows by the values of some columns, with the sum, mean, min, max, ... of others, into a sheet of its own
• Column type marks in the headers (# numbers, @ dates, ? booleans) and per-column display formats: thousands separators, decimal places and date formats (right-click a column header → Format; %)
• Follow a growing file like tail -f (File → Follow End of File; T): appended lines of CSV / TSV files are read on their own, and the view stays at the last row; File → Open Recent lists the last files opened
• Go to a row, a cell (B12 or R12C2) or a column by its name or letter (Edit → Go To..., Ctrl+G in both UIs)
• Hide columns (right-click a column header; x in the terminal UI) and show them all again (View → Show All Columns; X)
• Freeze the first columns so that they stay in place when scrolling sideways (right-click a column header or View → Freeze Columns; |)
• Edit cells of CSV / TSV and Excel files in edit mode (Edit → Edit Mode; I in the terminal UI), with undo, paste of tab-separated text and saving that rewrites only the edited lines or cells, keeping the encoding, compression and everything else of the file; nothing can change a file outside edit mode
• Export a sheet as shown (sorted, filtered, without hidden columns) to CSV, TSV, Excel (.xlsx) or Parquet (File → Export View...; w); Excel and Parquet keep numbers, booleans and dates typed, also when they come from CSV text
• Asynchronous loading on a worker thread, so large files open instantly
• Sorting and filtering CSV / TSV and Excel files of any size, in memory; when the rows read from a CSV / TSV file take about 100 MB, 500 MB and 1 GB of memory, and every 2 GB from then on, TableSkim asks whether to keep reading or to show only the rows read so far
• Ragged rows, dates, merged cells and non-ASCII (e.g. Japanese) text and file names
• The first row of CSV / TSV and Excel files is taken as a header when it looks like one, or as chosen (Parquet and databases have their own column names), monospace font, and several FLTK themes
• A user manual in English and Japanese, built in (Help → User Manual, F1) and installed as HTML for web browsers; see also docs/
• A terminal UI with the same features, for use over SSH, started by the same tableskim command
• Native builds for Linux, macOS and Windows with all dependencies linked statically

Usage

See the user manual (日本語) for a full guide with screenshots. The manual is also online on the TableSkim website.

tableskim [options] [files...]

tableskim opens the GUI when a graphical display is available and the terminal UI otherwise: on Linux when neither DISPLAY nor WAYLAND_DISPLAY is set, and on macOS in an SSH session. Each file opens in its own window. The terminal UI shows exactly one file, which must be given on the command line (it exits with an error otherwise).

Option	Description
-t, --tui	Use the terminal UI even if a graphical display is available
--log <file>	Write log messages to a file
--encoding <name>	Encoding of CSV / TSV files: auto (default), utf-8, utf-16le, utf-16be or cp932 (shift_jis)
--header <when>	Whether the first row of CSV / TSV files and Excel sheets holds the column names: auto (default), yes or no
-v, --verbose	Enable verbose (debug) logging
-V, --version	Show version information and exit

--summary and --head N print each file's columns with their types (and, with --summary, statistics) and its first rows to standard output as Markdown or JSON (--format json), and exit without a UI: a quick look at any table file from a script or an AI agent. See Printing a summary.

tableskim --summary data.xlsx
tableskim --head 20 --format json data.csv.gz

Files can also be opened from File → Open... (Ctrl+O).

On macOS the command is the executable inside the app bundle; to put it on the PATH:

ln -s /Applications/TableSkim.app/Contents/MacOS/TableSkim /usr/local/bin/tableskim

On Windows, TableSkim.exe is a GUI application (without a console) for the GUI. Use tableskim-tui.exe, installed next to it, for the terminal UI: it is a console application, so it runs in the terminal it is started from.

Terminal UI

Log messages are written only with --log <file> (they would otherwise be drawn over the screen). Press ? for the key list. Main keys: arrows or hjkl to move, Ctrl+G to go to a row, cell or column, Shift+arrows or v to select, x / X to hide the column / show all columns, | to freeze the columns up to the cursor, Enter to show a whole cell in the sidebar, S for the statistics of the cursor's column, B for its histogram, y to copy the selection as TSV, w to export the sheet as shown, Tab to switch sheets, s for the sidebar, H to switch the first row between the guess and header / data (CSV / TSV and Excel), E to switch the text encoding, r to revert, q to quit.

Copying uses the OSC 52 escape sequence, so it works over SSH; the terminal must allow it (inside tmux, enable set-clipboard).

Building

Requirements:

• A C++20 compiler (GCC, Clang, AppleClang or MSVC 2026)
• CMake 3.26 or newer (Ninja recommended)
• On Linux: the system development packages listed below (GUI builds need fontconfig, X11 and the Wayland/Cairo/Pango stack)

The bundled dependencies (FLTK, DuckDB, SQLite, OpenXLSX, csv-parser, CLI11, spdlog, zlib, bzip2, xz, zstd, RE2, Abseil, Catch2, FTXUI) are downloaded with CMake's FetchContent during the first configure. The first build compiles DuckDB and therefore takes a while.

Linux / macOS

On Ubuntu 24.04, install the build tools first (for both GUI and TUI):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential cmake ninja-build git pkg-config

For the default GUI build, also install these system development packages, as in CI. FetchContent builds FLTK itself, but does not install its system libraries:

sudo apt-get install -y \
  libfontconfig1-dev libx11-dev libxext-dev libxft-dev libxinerama-dev \
  libxcursor-dev libxrender-dev libxfixes-dev libpango1.0-dev libcairo2-dev \
  libwayland-dev wayland-protocols libxkbcommon-dev libdbus-1-dev \
  libgtk-3-dev libdecor-0-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev

Other Linux distributions need the corresponding development packages; see .github/workflows/ci.yml for Rocky Linux 8 and 10. The TUI-only build needs none of these GUI packages:

cmake --preset release -DTABLESKIM_BUILD_GUI=OFF
./build.sh

To enable the optional Linux UI tests, install python3-pyte (TUI) and xvfb (GUI). ccache is optional and speeds up repeated builds.

On macOS, install the Xcode command line tools, CMake and Ninja. For the default GUI build on Linux or macOS, run:

./build.sh            # release build + tests
./build.sh debug      # debug build + tests

The build output goes to build/<preset>/. The steps can also be run manually:

cmake --preset release
cmake --build --preset release
ctest --preset release

The asan preset builds and tests a Debug build with AddressSanitizer and UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer (cmake --preset asan, cmake --build --preset asan, ctest --preset asan).

macOS builds run on macOS 12 or later (CMAKE_OSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET). The macos-x86_64-release and macos-x86_64-debug presets build for Intel Macs, also on Apple silicon, where the tests run under Rosetta 2; TABLESKIM_PRESET=macos-x86_64-release ./package.sh dmg packages it.

To build only the terminal UI (no FLTK, X11 or fontconfig needed, e.g. for a headless server), configure with -DTABLESKIM_BUILD_GUI=OFF; tableskim then always starts the terminal UI.

On Linux, system libraries can be used instead of the bundled ones:

CMake option	Uses system copy of
-DTABLESKIM_USE_SYSTEM_FLTK=ON	FLTK (1.4 or newer)
-DTABLESKIM_USE_SYSTEM_SQLITE=ON	SQLite
-DTABLESKIM_USE_SYSTEM_COMPRESSION=ON	zlib, bzip2, liblzma, zstd

Web app (WebAssembly)

The core also builds as WebAssembly for a browser-only app (web/), which reads the file in the browser without uploading it. With the Emscripten SDK (in ~/emsdk, or sourced with emsdk_env.sh) and Node.js with npm:

./web.sh              # build, then serve at http://127.0.0.1:8765/
./web.sh --dev        # Vite's development server, reloading as web/src changes
./web.sh --pages      # serve without the isolation headers, as GitHub Pages does
./web.sh --help       # --debug, --port, --open, --no-build

See src/wasm/README.md for the details and its tests.

Windows

Use the Visual Studio 2026 presets:

cmake --preset vs-release
cmake --build --preset vs-release

or, from a Developer Command Prompt, the Ninja presets (which also use ccache when it is installed):

cmake --preset msvc-release
cmake --build --preset msvc-release

Packaging

./package.sh [deb|rpm|dmg|zip|all]     # Linux / macOS
package.bat  [exe|zip|msix|all]        # Windows

Packages are written to the release build directory. Pushing a tag such as v0.1.0 builds packages for every platform with GitHub Actions and attaches them to a GitHub release:

• Linux: .deb (built on Ubuntu 24.04), .rpm (built on Rocky Linux 10), and three ZIPs built on Rocky Linux 8 (glibc 2.28) for older distributions: the GUI with Wayland, the GUI for X11 only (-x11), and the terminal UI only (tableskim-tui)
• macOS: .dmg and .zip
• Windows: installer (.exe) and .zip; package.bat msix is not part of the release

Development

• src/common/ — core library: data model, file backends, threading
• src/gui/ — FLTK GUI (layout in gui.fl)
• src/tui/ — FTXUI terminal UI
• src/main.cxx — the tableskim entry point, which picks the GUI or TUI
• tests/ — Catch2 unit tests
• demo/ — script that generates the sample files in demo/data/

See AGENTS.md for architecture notes, coding conventions and instructions for adding a new file format.

License

TableSkim is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. The bundled fonts, BIZ UDPGothic and M PLUS 1 Code, are distributed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (src/fonts/). The license texts of the fonts and of all bundled libraries are shown in Help → About... (at the end of the ? help in the terminal UI) and installed as THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.txt.