What is sc-im?

sc-im is a spreadsheet calculator that runs entirely inside a terminal window. Instead of a graphical interface with a mouse, it uses keyboard commands inspired by the Vim text editor. The project is a modern continuation of an older Unix program called sc, originally written by James Gosling and Mark Weiser. sc-im is maintained by a single developer and accepts donations to support continued development. The interface looks and behaves like a traditional spreadsheet grid, with rows and columns for entering numbers and text. Navigation uses the same hjkl keys as Vim, and other Vim-style commands handle actions like yanking cells, inserting or deleting rows, and undoing changes. The spreadsheet supports up to 65,536 rows and 702 columns by default, expandable to over a million rows if needed. sc-im can read and write several file formats, including CSV, TSV, XLSX, and ODS. It can also export tables as Markdown. For data visualization, it can communicate with GNUPlot to produce charts from spreadsheet data. Users can write scripts in Lua to automate tasks, and the program can also run without any user interaction, taking its input from an external script file. Other features include row filtering and sorting, subtotals, cell formatting options such as bold and italic, clipboard support, and customizable colors using RGB values. Wide character support covers a range of alphabets including Japanese, Chinese, Greek, Russian, and several European languages. Building sc-im from source requires ncurses, bison, gcc, and make. On macOS, Homebrew can install it in one command. Optional dependencies like xlsxwriter and libxml add XLSX support, while Lua and GNUPlot unlock scripting and graphing features. Configuration lives in a plain text file at ~/.config/sc-im/scimrc.