📖 A Vim spreadsheet calculator plugin.

Written by torresjrjr.

This is an ongoing project over Christmas 2019. tabulae.vim aims to be a Vim plugin which opens spreadsheet-like, tab-delimited .tae files and allows spreadsheet previews with live calculations. Essentially, this plugin will turn Vim into an Excel-like TUI program.

See MODEL.md for more comprehensive detail.

tabulae.vim will work with internally defined .tae files, which are tab-delimited files with special syntax, and are worked as spreadsheets.

Milestone ⛰️ ! A rudimentary "view" buffer now works, with the _EvalView() function. The _EvalCell() function is capable of basic data handling.

" ./examples/spreadsheet.tae
:source plugin/tabulae.vim | call _InitView() | call _EvalView() 

Todo:

• Discover concealing characters for metadata markers in the viewbuffer.
• Make _EvalCell() capable of evaluating equations/formulae.
• Make a true _SetCell() function (unlikely needed, since side effects of setting multiple cells is desirable).
• Improve in data type distinction, and standardise metadata sequences (likely will be similar to ANSI escape sequences).
• Decide how to define a cell with leading whitespace.
• Decide on local/buffer settings, like 'listchars', 'buftype', etc.
• Consider efficiency improvements regarding _itercellpos() and minimising evaluations (consider the viewport, or a history of dependant cells or evaluated cells).
• Make plugin work around .tae filetype buffers.
• Consider how 'workbooks' would work (a spreadsheet on each tab, with methods to link data and navigate between one other, like gf). How would buffer and tab management work? How would a workbook file structure work?
• Consider conditional or inherited formatting based on the metadata of a cell's column's header cell. This could save space by only writting metadata once per each column.

Roo! Completely new model. There are now more functions handling buffers, cells and more. New first draft eval buffer processing functions now work!

eval buffer - before processing

eval buffer - after processing

.tae files are now read into an intermediate eval buffer, where cells with metadata containing the equation/formula attribute are evaluated (recursively if dependant on other un-evaluated cells).

Then, further proccesing is given to a view buffer, which will correspond to an individual spreadsheet (meaning multiple view buffers are possible). Functions will iterate over all cells, formatting them by there metadata. The result is a simple, tab-delimited spreadsheet, formatted and with all evaluated values.

These view buffers will have a special interface, with the cursor spanning a cell, and motion and editing based on a spreadsheet design. hjkl will navigate the view buffer spreadsheet by cells, and i, c, d, etc will edit cells.

In the future, I hope to create a popup-like edit buffer, which will handle single cells and their content. Such a buffer would handle editing easier, as opposed to the only other method of editing the .tae file by hand. Content once ZZ'ed could be preproccessed; for example, a multi-line string could have it's newline chars converted to \n escape sequences in compliance to the .tae format specification.

Otherwise, the default way to edit the spreadsheet will be to open up the .tae file with the cursor at the corresponding cell. Of course, users would be forced to also think about conforming to the format, and not messing the whole file up.

Much is left for imagination. I hope to continue this to it's minimum viable end. Happy new year 🐦 🎉 !

Flap! Cell references in cell data now work!

For now, specifically only Absolute Addresses (A1, C23, etc) are parsed, and recursively evaluated. For example:

#= A1 + A2 + 5        The cell
#= 10 + A2 + 5        1st address is evaluated
#= 10 + 20 + 5        2nd address is evaluated
#  25                 Cell is evaluated

In the future, Relative Addresses ({0,-2}, {19,23}, etc) will be parsed and converted to Absolute Addresses. For example: {0,-2} => B3.

In the future, Address Ranges (A1:C1, B1:B100, etc) will be parsed and converted to a string of comma-separated Absolute Addresses. For example: A1:C1 => A1,B1,C1.

Great progress.

If you like the idea and want to contribute to this project, contact me at t.me/torresjrjr.

This project aspires to follow the Semantic Versioning scheme.

I was inspired to make this plugin, because I was intrigued by sc-im, a spreadsheet calculator with vim-like controls. However, I couldn't install and try it out since I run MSYS2 on Windows, so I though I would make one myself.

• It's portable. Installs anywhere with Vim.
• Would use Vim-like controls natively.
• It's potentially useful for many cases.
• It's a nice challenge.