L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility

Cool to see this here! There are quite a few other terminal based spreadsheet people have been doing over the last few years.

Most notably:

https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im

Has been in HN often, most recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662658

New takes: https://github.com/zaphar/sheetsui https://github.com/garritfra/cell

I can highly suggest visidata! https://www.visidata.org

It's an incredibly useful piece of software for data wrangling and exploration.

Hey, another 1-2-3 nerd :)

I don't have any nostalgia it, I just appreciate how thoughtfully it was designed for data-input efficiency. I actually ported the official UNIX version of 1-2-3 to Linux a few years ago, I still use it regularly. It uses some tricks to get the original UNIX binaries working on Linux: https://github.com/taviso/123elf

I had been thinking about how to add UTF-8 support, it only supports LMBCS (Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set) by default. It's actually worse than that, it stores everything internally as LMBCS but in a lot of cases can only display ASCII, so it transliterates a lot of characters (e.g. é -> e).

It's also possible to run the real DOS version in dosemu - in terminal mode it's basically indistinguishable from an ncurses application, although dosemu is just cleverly sampling the framebuffer and translating it on-the-fly.

I wrote a display driver to make that work a little better: https://github.com/taviso/lotusdrv

Very early in my career I made friends with the business’s sole Lotus Notes administrator, "the email server guy." He was pretty proud of what it could do, and I sometimes get nostalgic for the admin UI.

I took Lotus 1-2-3 course along with Wordstar and dBase when I was in elementary school. Good times.

It would be great to have a terminal compatible Wordperfect alternative, like in the MS DOS days. Can you use Vim to edit documents for printing?

I remember being a teenager and building forms using the Lotus 123 WYSIWYG graphics.

See also Wordgrinder, a text-mode word processor. (As distinct from a text editor.) https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder

Doesn't seem as useful as visidata. Will check out though! Looks like a fun weekend project :)

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