Config formatted sheets

[geekscrapy]

For those that load the same sheet types repeatedly it might be good to allow to pre-set the column types (and other things like aggs?) in .visidatarc.

For example, to always set the "timestamp" column in every sheet to date type:
Basesheet.columns.timestamp.type = date

To rename a column:
Basesheet.columns.prevcolname.name = "timestamp"

To automatically sort once the sheet has loaded:
Basesheet.columns.timestamp.sort = 'asc'

Thoughts? Do people use the same source data repeatedly?

[frosencrantz]

I have some common queries I perform around the same set of tables or other datasources. I've wrapped them up into some scripts. I typically perform the query, then I might use a VisiData script to reshape the types and sorting. While I use the VisiData scripting, I wish there was a more declarative way, matching column names to types, formatting, sorting, ordering, and visible/hidden.

I had thought maybe vds format might be possible to use, but that requires formatting that data as json, which only some of my data is already. This is not a big problem, but haven't tried it yet.

I might be getting away from the idea you were suggesting where you could update your .visidatarc file and say based on a column name alone it is safe to assume the format of the column's type and formatting. I think someone recently (last few months) responded on an older issue or discussion that they had solved a problem like by creating their own command they ran after loading data.

[saulpw]

I've been thinking about a simplified cmdlog that doesn't specify the sheet/col/row for every command, but has separate commands to go to the specified sheet/col/row. Then you only need the longname and the input:

col num
type-int
rename-col number

We can make shorter aliases for the commands, or allow the keystrokes themselves to work. We could use e.g. , instead of newline as the command separator, and an option like -m on the CLI to specify this cmdlog string, or -k for keystrokes. Then:

vd foo.csv -m "col num, type-int, rename-col number"

or even:

vd foo.csv -k $'cnum\n#^number\n'

How far does this get us?

[geekscrapy]

Personally, the reason I mentioned putting it in .rc a specific config file is to make it a set and forget, and easily distributable.
Plus, if you have a lot of columns, defining all these on the command line could be clumsy and a bit error prone

[frosencrantz]

I wonder if @skeept's suggestion in #349 would be helpful here.

Looks like @skeept uses this: https://github.com/skeept/dotvim/blob/master/test/keep/visidatarc

skeept adds a guess-types command with a guessType function.

[geekscrapy]

#1681 ref

[frosencrantz]

@cool-RR shared autotune code: https://gist.github.com/cool-RR/0a2222468c5673b4dcb6c772e110620c

#1700 (comment) ref

And a note from Saul at some point it might be possible to auto-trigger: #1681 (comment)

[saulpw]

Okay, with the new Sheet.afterLoad function, @geekscrapy's original request is very doable. I even added a new DefaultAttrDict to get nearly the exact syntax requested:

Sheet.knownCols.timestamp.type = date
DirSheet.knownCols.directory.width = 0

[geekscrapy]

Well, this is amazing 😅