Works on windows w/o WSL?

[charris-msft]

Hey folks,
I've been an admirer of Visidata for some time but do all my work on Windows (and sometimes WSL). I could have been using Visidata, but didn't because of the extra WSL hoop (shame on me!)

After recently using some data engineering tools with pipx, I decided to try it with Visidata...
pipx install visidata
and so far, it's worked beautifully!

Yes, I have WSL installed, but from a PowerShell prompt I can just type visidata .\myawesome.csv.

unfortunately, on my machine vd doesn't work. Windows just asks how do I want to open the file and looking at it I see a bit of python code:

#!C:\Users\charris\.local\pipx\venvs\visidata\Scripts\python.exe

import visidata.main

if __name__ == '__main__':
    visidata.main.vd_cli()

But who cares, this is awesome that it seems to just work! (and I could always create an alias for visidata.exe).

Has anyone tried this (rather than opening directly via WSL)? Are there any known issues?

[ajkerrigan]

Hiya @charris-msft , glad the pipx install worked outside WSL! Regarding the vd vs. visidata executable, I know it has come up in previous issues (see also #1406 and #1268) but I don't know what if anything could/should change to avoid that confusion on Windows.

As for running inside vs. outside WSL, my main suggestion would be to consider falling back to WSL if you hit any strange behavior. Pretty vague I know! But since much of VisiData's development and usage is Linux or Mac-focused, you might find some lesser-used features or plugins that make accidental platform assumptions.

[saulpw]

Hey @charris-msft, thanks for the post. There are a few Windows users and my impression is that it works reasonably well. There are some missing elements (like the underline attribute, used in both the column headers and to divide top/bottom split-screen), and some features that won't work without configuration. I believe @aborruso and his crew use Windows, maybe they can chime in.

I'd love to have a proper Windows executable, ideally a plain downloadable .exe but it seems like that's not a reasonable thing to do these days on modern Windows. I did a basic pass in 2021 (which is in visidata/vdplus) to get a first version in the Microsoft App Store, and I ultimately gave up when it got caught in review--maybe this will become easier with Microsoft's recent decision on commercial open source apps. If you or anyone who uses Windows is interested in taking another pass at this, hit me up!

[aborruso]

Hi all, I have never used Windows.

I use VisiData in WSL for Linux and it works really great.

[saulpw]

Also how do you feel about making this a general Windows discussion thread? I'd love a place to point people with issues like #1431 for a broader discussion.

[charris-msft]

I love the idea!

[danihinder]

Have you ever tried to replay a command log? Doesn't work for me and I'm not sure if this is because of I'm on windows or something else. It just does nothing when I invoke the --play option. I should/will try this in WSL, maybe it's just me :)

[danihinder]

I installed it with pip install visidata, to get excel sheets working, I installed pip install xlrd openpyxl

[anjakefala]

Yup! And to get .ods working, you install odfpy.

You are right that it would be nice if we could add documentation on installing optional modules to the install page.

[danihinder]

I should have mentioned, I already tried pip install odfpy to no avail. But I'm actually pretty new to python, so assume the worst with me :)

[danihinder]

Nevermind, I just installed pip install odfpy in a WSL SuSE and it's working fine there. So it's something self made in my Windows installation which I'll figure out then for myself. No worries, the documentation is top notch, the "odfpy" part was missing, that's all.
I just made a test in WSL with an .odf file regarding the cmdlog problem, it doesn't work there. It's exactly the same behaviour like with the .xls file.

[danihinder]

I just found out what I did wrong: If I had opened a file in an already running visidata instance, the subsequent playback of the cmdlog did not work, because the file name in the cmdlog is missing. If I open the same file at the command line with visidata ./some_file.xlsx, the subsequent playback of the cmdlog works. Stupid beginner's mistake, I could have recognized it earlier in the cmdlog, it's there in plain text. Now everything really works and I am more than happy! Sorry for the confusion with .xlsx .ods etc... I assumed a bug, but I'm glad, it was really just me :)