iData

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What's iData for?

When working with very large tabular datasets, macOS surprisingly doesn’t offer many native tools that handle them gracefully. VisiData is an excellent solution—but as a command-line tool, it sometimes feels like bringing a terminal to a double-click fight.

That’s where iData comes in. Built with Swift and SwiftUI, iData provides a smooth, native macOS interface while quietly running VisiData under the hood. Instead of launching a terminal, you can simply double-click a giant table file and start exploring—a small convenience that becomes surprisingly valuable in data-heavy fields like bioinformatics.

It also supports gzipped tabular files directly, meaning you can open compressed datasets without the ritual of manual decompression. If you regularly wrestle with large data files, you probably already know how nice that feels.

Install iData

Install with Homebrew Cask:

brew install --cask laleoarrow/tap/idata

Upgrade later:

brew upgrade --cask laleoarrow/tap/idata

iData does not bundle VisiData. Install VisiData separately.

Recommended install:

pipx install visidata
pipx inject visidata openpyxl pyxlsb xlrd zstandard

Optional alternative:

brew install visidata

Note: if you use Homebrew and need extra VisiData plugins (for example Excel loaders), install them in the same Python environment used by vd.

If you use a custom install path, set the vd executable path in Preferences.

If VisiData is missing, iData stays on the welcome screen and shows install guidance instead of opening a blank terminal pane.

Common format examples

• csv
• tsv
• json
• jsonl
• xlsx
• ma
• bed.bgz
• csv.gz
• tsv.gz
• study.any_weird_suffix

iData forwards most regular files directly to VisiData. It only special-cases gzip-like compression (.gz, .bgz, .bgzf) and streams those files without extracting them.

Updates

iData uses Sparkle 2 for in-app updates.

• brew install path: brew install --cask laleoarrow/tap/idata
• release assets live on GitHub Releases
• the update feed lives at docs/appcast.xml and is intended for GitHub Pages hosting
• package a release with ./scripts/package_release.sh <version>
• after a GitHub release is published, .github/workflows/sync-homebrew-cask.yml updates laleoarrow/homebrew-tap automatically when HOMEBREW_TAP_TOKEN is configured

Development

Run tests:

swift test
/bin/zsh -lc 'xcodebuild -project iData.xcodeproj -scheme iDataApp -configuration Debug -clonedSourcePackagesDirPath .build/SourcePackages -derivedDataPath .build/xcode-debug build'

Build the app bundle:

./scripts/build_app.sh

Package a GitHub release asset:

./scripts/package_release.sh 0.1.10

Install locally:

• Copy dist/iData.app into /Applications
• Quit any other running iData instance before testing the release build
• Open dist/iData-v0.1.10-macos-universal.dmg if you want the drag-to-Applications installer view
• Or run dist/iData-v0.1.10-macos-universal.pkg for the installer package flow