VIBE-EDITOR

100% vibe-coded CSV/TSV spreadsheet editor with strong hacker vibes

A few days ago I wanted a simple CSV/TSV file editor which:

• Is actually fun to use, to help me want to do my taxes 🤣
• Is minimal and fast on Raspberry Pi hardware
• Has a cool hacker-style dark mode
• Has intuitive keyboard/mouse navigation, that actually makes sense to me
• Supports cells with drop-down menus and checkboxes
• Colors negative numbers red.
• Displays a sum when multiple numeric cells are selected
• Can search the spreadsheet easily

For years I've just been suffering with the choice between LibreOffice, and a poorly written shell script I made, but this is 2026! Learning to code is now 100% optional for things like this. After about an hour, this is what Gemini 3.1 Pro delivered. Don't ask me how it works. I don't know how it works. I don't need to.

Purpose

This repo serves as a time capsule for what AI was capable of during this point in time. A year ago making something like this would have been a struggle. Now it was easy. How much will it improve in another year?
This is mainly as a demo and for my personal use. However, if you use this, like it, and want to see a feature added, go open an issue or pull request.

Features

• To support cell formatting in raw text, I made a simple flag system.
  • A column title ending with :ro means read-only, so you can't make accidental changes.
  • A column title ending with :chk means checkbox, where TRUE means checked and anything else means unchecked.
  • A column title ending with :cb=value1,value2,value3 means combo-box, where "value1", "value2", and "value3" are easy to choose from a drop-down menu.
• Fully custom keyboard navigation. It might not come naturally to you, but to me it makes much more sense than normal spreadsheet editors.
  • Navigate cells using the arrow keys.
  • Press Enter to start editing that cell.
    • While editing, all 4 arrow keys work inside the text box. Up arrow skips to the beginning of the line, Down skips to the end.
    • Press Enter again to exit editing. The selection is not shifted downward. I prefer it this way.
  • Press Ctrl+S to save
  • Press Ctrl+F and start typing a phrase to search for
    • The search starts from the visible part of the spreadsheet and searches down, and wraps around if no matches found.
    • Press Enter to highlight the next result below the current one.
    • Press Shift+Enter to highlight the next result above the current one.
  • Press Ctrl+Arrow key to skip to the next/last non-empty cell, just like in other spreadsheet editors.
• Select multiple numeric cells at once, and the status bar will display their sum.
• Each column will auto-scale to the width of the widest value in your data.
  • If your spreadsheet is wider than the app window, horizontal scrolling is smooth and does not snap to the nearest column. (like LibreOffice does 😠)
• Open a file by specifying it as an argument to this python script.
  • When saving, it makes changes to the input file you specified.
• The usual annoying stuff is gone. (Looking at you, LibreOffice...)
  • No 30-second app launch time.
  • No "helpful tips" popup.
  • No "confirm file overwrite" popup.
  • No "close with unsaved changes" popup.
  • No "CSV format is dumb and you should consider using ODS" popup.

Dependencies

This uses PyQT5, so on Debian-based operating systems this should be enough:

sudo apt install python3-pyqt5 qtwayland5

DEMO

I've included a fictitious TSV file to show the features.
To run the demo:

git clone https://github.com/Botspot/vibe-editor
cd vibe-editor
./vibe-editor.py ./demo.tsv