mange: The program with a delicate name

Every time I find a csv tool of some sort, I end up wishing I had more chances to work with csv files. The first program for today is a great example, even if I have to be careful how I phrase these next few sentences. This is mange:

  

Before I am hounded by rabid animal rights activists, just let me say I didn’t pick the name. I can’t find any sort of explanation as to why “mange” is the title, unless there are non-English and non-other-languages-I-speak references. If you know, let me in on the secret.

And I’d like to know, because mange is a pretty good program. I don’t come across many csv editors — viewers, yes, and utilities, yes. Even spreadsheets for the console. But now that I think of it, not many editors. Finding mange is a lucky event.

mange works in a straightforward fashion — arrow keys to navigate cells, enter to edit them. mange will stick to an editor mode and fall cell by cell as you edit, which makes data entry much easier.

mange also has the sense enough to display and keep a header row, as you can see in the images above. And it seems to handle terminal width and four-way scrolling without too much effort.

I did see a couple of screen corruption problems, usually when editing a long field on a wide spreadsheet that was pressed up against the rightmost edge. I have a feeling there might be a small tweak to get the screen to refresh properly after editing a cell that stretches over the screen width.

mange has a couple of features I didn’t get to, just because they’re tied to the statistical package r, and the time it would take me to learn to work them together would delay this post until about Thursday. So take it on faith that mange can feed data into r, and generate plots and graphs.

Your best bet for getting started with mange is the man page, where most of the controls and the editing-command-navigation modes are explained. It won’t take long.

I’m sad to see that the last update to mange was around three years ago, which makes me wonder if the list of coming attractions in the README file is ever going to materialize. I guess that remains to be seen.