Charles Choi is back with another app in his Casual Suit.This time it’s Casual CSV, a front end for csv-mode. As Choi says, CSV is a seemingly simple format but the rules are really fussy and easy to violate. That’s where csv-model comes in. You can see Choi’s post for some of the amenities it offers but the nicest, in my opinion, is the ability to display the file in a spreadsheet format. Again, see Choi’s post for a screen shot. One of the things that Casual CSV adds is the ability to select a region of rows and export them to an Org or Markdown table (if your flavor of Markdown supports tables).
Choi says that he thinks of CSV files as a data exchange format and avoids editing them if he can. I certainly agree with that. I’m sure I could count the number of times I’ve edited a CSV file on a single hand. Nonetheless, it’s nice to have a tool that can make having to do so a bit easier.
At the end of his post Choi offers a few suggestions to make working with CSV easier. He says you should turn off line wrapping and turning on field alignment and separator auto detection. He provides a bit of Elisp that you can add to your configuration to do this automatically. Now he could only find a way of having me wrirte CSV instead of CVS (the pharmacy). I got it wrong more times than right in my first draft of this post.
Sidenote
Sorry for posting this late. I’m traveling and my network connection is sketchy.