Xeli

Excel for the Terminal — an interactive TUI spreadsheet with AI-powered queries.

Open CSV, JSON, Parquet, and Excel files in a beautiful interactive spreadsheet. Query data with natural language (AI → SQL), filter/sort visually, and export results — all from your terminal.

Install

# npm (no install — runs once)
npx @josharsh/xeli data.csv

# npm (global)
npm install -g @josharsh/xeli

# Homebrew
brew install josharsh/tap/xeli

Or grab a prebuilt binary from the latest release.

Supported platforms: macOS (Apple Silicon & Intel) and Linux (arm64 & x86_64). Windows is not currently supported.

Quick Start

# View a CSV file
xeli data.csv

# View JSON data
xeli sales.json

# Pipe data in
cat data.csv | xeli

# Choose a theme
xeli data.csv --theme nord

Features

• Multi-format: CSV, TSV, JSON, JSONL, Parquet, Excel (xlsx)
• Interactive table: Vim-style navigation, scrolling, cell selection
• Search: Regex search across all columns (/)
• Filter: Visual filter builder with multiple operators (f)
• Sort: Click-to-sort on any column (s)
• AI queries: Natural language → SQL via OpenAI/Anthropic (Ctrl+K)
• SQL mode: Direct DuckDB SQL queries (Ctrl+Q)
• Column stats: Min, max, mean, median, nulls, unique count (Ctrl+I)
• Export: Export filtered data to CSV, JSON, or Parquet (e)
• Clipboard: Copy cell values (y)
• Themes: Dracula, Nord, Catppuccin, Tokyo Night, Solarized (t)
• Command palette: Fuzzy search all commands (Ctrl+P)
• Undo: Full operation history (u)
• Mouse support: Click, scroll, resize

Power Features

• Formula bar: Evaluate expressions like SUM(price), price * qty (=)
• Computed columns: Add derived columns with custom expressions (c)
• Group-by / Pivot: Multi-column grouping with aggregation wizard (g)
• Join: Join with another file — INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, FULL (J)
• Sparkline: Histogram visualization for numeric columns (v)

Keybindings

| Key | Action | |-----|--------| | h/j/k/l or arrows | Move cursor | | G | Go to bottom | | Ctrl+d / Ctrl+u | Page down / up | | Tab / Shift+Tab | Next / prev column | | / | Search (regex) | | n / N | Next / prev search match | | f | Add filter | | F | Clear all filters | | s | Sort current column | | Ctrl+K | AI query | | Ctrl+Q | SQL query | | Enter | Cell detail view | | Ctrl+I | Column statistics | | - / + | Hide / show columns | | H / L | Resize column | | = | Formula bar | | c | Add computed column | | g | Group-by / pivot wizard | | J | Join another file | | v | Sparkline chart | | e | Export data | | y | Copy cell to clipboard | | t | Cycle theme | | r | Toggle row numbers | | u | Undo | | Ctrl+P | Command palette | | ? | Help | | q | Quit |

AI Setup

Set your API key to enable natural language queries:

# OpenAI
xeli config set-key openai sk-...
# or
export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...

# Anthropic
xeli config set-key anthropic sk-ant-...
# or
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...

Then press Ctrl+K and ask questions like:

• "show me top 10 employees by salary"
• "how many people are in each department?"
• "average salary by city for active employees"

Building from Source

cargo build --release
# Binary at target/release/xeli

Tech Stack

• Rust — single binary, no runtime dependencies
• Ratatui — terminal UI framework
• DuckDB — in-process analytical database engine
• Clap — CLI argument parsing
• Tokio — async runtime for AI queries

License

MIT