I tend to prefer them, too. They're remarkably 'sticky' for me. I've been using Vim for at least 20 years, and mutt for close to that (can't recall exactly when I started using them).
Been wishing for a solid, console-based spreadsheet for a while, but I haven't really gone looking that hard, as I don't use spreadsheets as much as I used to. When I do, though, I find modern GUI spreadsheets want to 'help' way too much and frankly bug the crap out of me. I suppose if I used them more, they'd brainwash me into their 'right' way of doing things, but I generally get fed up and use Postgres. That works surprisingly well for a lot of things, but updating 'cells' via SQL gets tedious, and if I'm trying to get an understanding of the data, a more visual approach is really handy.
I've tried doing that with awk a few times, and find I just haven't written enough to make it non-painful. I did write a ton of Perl at one point, and it seems to have hijacked the associated neurons.
Spending a weekend messing about with awk until I'm comfortable is one line in a very, very long list of things I'll probably never get to.
Any programming language with a line- and field-based orientation should do it. Awk is easy because of the implied input loop over the data, and the ability to slice by columns.
If you want additional outputs, you simply create them. For a trivial example, if you've got a list of revenues and expenses (say, by month), and want a report with monthly and annual totals (I'll assume only one year is fed, though the example could be expanded:
That's the equivalent of a spreadsheet with columns for revenues, costs, and profits, with a summary line. But you can run it over any annual datasource.
Now let me check if that's right.... OK, not too far off, though yes, I'd goofed bits (the first time).
Been wishing for a solid, console-based spreadsheet for a while, but I haven't really gone looking that hard, as I don't use spreadsheets as much as I used to. When I do, though, I find modern GUI spreadsheets want to 'help' way too much and frankly bug the crap out of me. I suppose if I used them more, they'd brainwash me into their 'right' way of doing things, but I generally get fed up and use Postgres. That works surprisingly well for a lot of things, but updating 'cells' via SQL gets tedious, and if I'm trying to get an understanding of the data, a more visual approach is really handy.
Definitely will check this tool out.