CSV Grid Editor

Open CSV, TSV and other delimited files in a spreadsheet-style grid inside VS Code. Edit cells with real undo and save, filter columns the way Excel does, query the file with SQL, and turn repeated cleanup into pipelines you can re-run.

Why

CSV files are the format everyone actually exchanges, and reading one in a text editor means counting commas. Opening it in a spreadsheet means leaving your editor, and often means the spreadsheet silently reformats your data on the way back out.

This extension puts the grid inside VS Code, on top of the file itself. The text document stays the source of truth, so Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Z, the dirty indicator, file watching and Git all behave exactly as they do for any other file. Nothing reformats your dates or drops your leading zeros.

Features

A real grid over a real file

• Virtualised rendering that stays smooth on files with 100,000 rows and more.
• Automatic delimiter detection for comma, tab, semicolon and pipe, with a per-file override.
• Column types inferred as integer, number, boolean, date or text, driving right-aligned numbers, numeric sorting and the right filter operators.
• Spreadsheet range selection with copy and paste to and from Excel. The status bar summarises the selection: count, sum, average, minimum and maximum.
• Edit with a double-click, F2, Enter, or by simply typing. Ctrl+S saves. Ctrl+Z undoes.

Excel-style AutoFilter

Click the caret in any column header, or press Alt+Down.

• A searchable list of the column's distinct values with row counts, tri-state (Select All), and (Blanks).
• Text, Number and Date condition filters: contains, begins with, greater than, between, before, is empty, and the rest, two at a time joined by And or Or, with * and ? wildcards.
• Value lists cascade from the other columns' filters, so you never pick a combination that matches nothing.
• Sorting, and a one-click clear per column.

Find, replace and sort

Ctrl+F opens find and replace with match case, whole cell and regular expression modes, live highlighting of every match, and replace-all in a single undo step. The Sort dialog does up to three levels and can either sort the view or write the new order to the file.

Edit rows and columns

Toolbar menus and right-click menus cover insert, duplicate, move, delete and hide for both rows and columns, on single items or whole selections. Beyond that: split a column into several, merge columns together, transpose the table, remove empty or duplicate rows, fill down and right with Ctrl+D and Ctrl+R, fill a series, trim whitespace, change case, and normalize rows whose field count does not match the header.

Understand the data

The Statistics panel gives per-column counts, distinct values, blanks, minimum and maximum, sum, mean, median, standard deviation, quartiles and the most frequent values. The Chart panel draws a histogram for numeric columns and a top-values bar chart for the rest.

Query it with SQL

The SQL panel loads the whole file into an in-memory SQLite database named csv and runs real queries against it, including joins onto itself, window functions and aggregates. Results can be copied or opened as a new CSV.

Pipelines: repeatable transformations

The same cleanup usually happens more than once. Describe it once as a *.csvpipe.json file and run it on demand, when the file opens, or when it is saved.

{
  "name": "Clean sales export",
  "applyTo": ["data/sales-*.csv"],
  "trigger": "onSave",
  "output": { "target": "file", "format": "json", "path": "out/${name}-summary.json" },
  "steps": [
    { "kind": "trim" },
    { "kind": "filter", "expression": "in_stock && units_sold > 0" },
    { "kind": "compute", "column": "margin", "expression": "round(revenue * 0.18, 2)" },
    { "kind": "sql", "query": "SELECT category, SUM(revenue) AS revenue FROM csv GROUP BY category" }
  ]
}

Because a command step just pipes the data through your shell, anything already installed works: pandas, R, jq, awk, csvkit, Miller, qsv. Steps that evaluate code only run in trusted workspaces.

Full reference: docs/pipelines.md.

Export

The whole file or just the selection, to JSON, Markdown, HTML, SQL inserts, or a different delimiter. Selections can go straight to the clipboard.

A sidebar for settings, pipelines and files

The CSV icon in the activity bar opens three views. Settings lists every option the extension contributes, grouped, showing its current value; click one to change it, with a toggle for booleans, a picker for choices and a validated prompt for numbers. It also surfaces the per-file header and delimiter overrides for the file you are looking at, which are otherwise invisible once set from the grid toolbar. Pipelines lists the workspace's pipelines with the ones matching the current file first, and runs or edits them in one click. Files lists every delimited file in the workspace and opens it in the grid.

A control in the Settings view title chooses whether edits go to User or Workspace settings, and the current scope is shown next to the view name.

Text mode

Open any CSV as text and each column gets its own colour, hovering a cell names its column, the status bar tracks the column under the cursor, and rows with the wrong field count are reported in the Problems panel.

Getting started

Install from the Marketplace, then open any .csv, .tsv, .tab or .psv file. That is the whole setup.

To go back to the plain text editor for one file, use Open as text in the editor title bar. To change the default for all CSV files:

"workbench.editorAssociations": { "*.csv": "default" }

Documentation

Commands

Every command is under the CSV category in the Command Palette.

Settings

Details in docs/settings.md.

Requirements

VS Code 1.90 or later. No other dependencies; everything ships in the extension.

Built with

Contributing

Development setup, architecture and conventions are in CONTRIBUTING.md. Issues and pull requests are welcome at https://github.com/bamr87/csv-vscoode.

License

MIT