Better CSV columns?

[Lasse Ronnenberg]

Suggested improvement to Notepad++

Reading CSV files is a burden. Even if I replace the separators (usually “;”) with a tabulator character ( \t ) it is still not properly displayed as columns.

I suggest adding tab indentation, like in Word!

A ruler at the top, where I click at some position to place a tab indentation mark.

The first tab in a line, will try to indent to that position, instead of the default tab positions that have always been available when you use the tabulator in Notepad++

[Alan Kilborn]

@Lasse-Ronnenberg

Reading CSV files is a burden

I don’t use it myself, but maybe you want to try out the CSV Lint plugin and see what it can do for you?

[Mark Olson]

CsvQuery is also a fine option for querying CSV files, although it increases Notepad++'s startup time pretty significantly.

[Coises]

You might be able to use my plugin Columns++ to help with this. See the help sections on Elastic tabstops and the Convert separated values to tabs… command.

Elastic tabstops is a conceptually simple algorithm defined by Nick Gravgaard for aligning tab-separated text. It works by treating each tab as a column separator and then making each column just large enough to hold its contents, much like the way a simple HTML table works.

In most cases, Convert separated values to tabs should be able to transform a csv file into tab-separated values without confusion.

There are some other handy functions in the plugin for working with data arranged in columns as well.

I currently consider the plugin to be in an “alpha” state. I use it, and I haven’t been seeing many problems reported, but it could be that hardly anyone is using it. If you use it, please let me know if you encounter any problems.