til/workflow/view-a-nicely-formatted-csv-in-terminal.md

View Nicely-Formatted CSV In Terminal

I'd just written and run a script to generate a CSV of data requested by a stakeholder. Before sending it over to them, I wanted to briefly browse through it to make sure the data passed a spot-check and that the way I structured things looked reasonable.

There are a dozen ways I can view a CSV file on my machine, but I wasn't interested in opening another program or navigating to the file in Finder.app.

I had generated the file in the terminal and I wanted to view it there.

The Rust-built csvlens CLI is just what I was looking for.

$ csvlens data_report_20250627.csv

This shows the data spaced out with columns and rows and has a set of keybindings that can be browsed with ?.

I got this tool from brew install csvlens.