Rainbow CSV colouring

[Amparose]

It would be useful to have some sugar for editing CSV files, which is difficult to do accurately a lot of the time without something like mechatroner/rainbow_csv: 🌈Rainbow CSV - Vim plugin: Highlight columns in CSV and TSV files and run queries in SQL-like language.

[markstos]

There's already a published tree-sitter grammar that's been published for rainbow CSV coloring. Here's how it looks when used in Helix:

You can add it to Helix with this in ~/.config/helix/languages.toml:

[[language]]
name = "csv"
file-types = ["csv"]
scope = "source.csv"

[[grammar]]
name = "csv"
source.git = "https://github.com/weartist/rainbow-csv-tree-sitter"
source.rev = "896e6d09b23a1b0d87e45bf97ca34a249f41495c"

Then:

hx --grammar fetch
hx --grammar build

Then place this in ~/.config/helix/runtime/queries/csv/highlights.scm

; Literals
(second)@keyword
(third)@function.method
(fourth)@number
(fifth)@comment
(sixth)@type
(seventh)@operator

If there's interest in Helix supporting this "out of the box", I could see about figuring how to submit a PR to add this as one of the built-in supported languages.

Yes, it's sort of abusing the query system to generate the rainbow colors, but as an exceptional case, this seems like the most useful way to look at CSV files in a text editor.

[gitmalong]

hx --grammar fetch
hx --grammar build

Not working on MacOS:

cargo:warning=xcrun: error: unable to lookup item 'PlatformVersion' from command line tools installation
cargo:warning=xcrun: error: unable to lookup item 'PlatformVersion' from command line tools installation
cargo:warning=xcrun: error: unable to lookup item 'PlatformVersion' in SDK '/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk'

[allemand-instable]

Then place this in ~/.config/helix/runtime/queries/csv/highlights.csv

; Literals
(second)@keyword
(third)@function.method
(fourth)@number
(fifth)@comment
(sixth)@type
(seventh)@operator

note that it should be named highlights.scm instead of highlights.csv for the syntax highlight to work so that it would match this file from rainbow-csv zed plugin

[glennDittmann]

Can confirm, changing the file ending to .scm enables highlighting (with .csv it did not work).

[gitmalong]

Rainbow coloring is nice but nothing beats indentation. Can this also be achieved via a simple trick? I envy https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=janisdd.vscode-edit-csv users.

[markstos]

At some point, there's a better tool for the job than a text editor.

VS Code is built on Electron, and it looks like for the CSV plugin they may be using the HTML guts of Electron to render the CSV as a table.

[AbeEstrada]

In the meantime https://github.com/wfxr/csview