tabv is an interactive pager for the command-line based on bash, awk, and vim, which visualizes tabular text files (TSV, CSV, and the like) in a column-aligned format. I developed this script predominantly for myself, because I was not satisfied with how alternative tools (most notably visidata) handle VCF files, which I work with on a daily basis. The script is small, simple and gets the job done, but for most use cases visidata is a more powerful tool.

• fixed header line at top of screen
• automatically find header line (i.e., skip comment lines at the beginning of file)
• row & column numbering
• alternating row colors
• hide (drop) column under cursor
• regular expression search
• interrupt loading of huge files (to speed up formatting and reduce memory consumption)
• detect double-quoted columns
• read from stdin

Example without tabv:

Example with tabv:

Command-line options:

tabv [-d DELIMITER] [-t TRUNCATE_COLUMN] [-q] [FILE]

    -d field delimiter [detect from file extension]
    -t truncate columns longer than this many characters [unlimited]
    -q disable auto-detection of double-quoted columns

Download the script tabv and place it in a directory in your $PATH environment variable, for example in /usr/local/bin. Make sure the script is executable.

sudo -s
cd /usr/local/bin
curl -L -o tabv https://raw.githubusercontent.com/suhrig/tabv/main/tabv
chmod a x tabv

• slow with big files
• high memory consumption with big files, since the entire content is held in memory
• non-ASCII characters can break the alignment
• auto-detection of double-quoted columns only works if all columns are wrapped in quotes