A CSV editor for Linux that is fast, focused, and genuinely nice to look at.
Named for the ghost costume, and for what other spreadsheet apps do to you.
Most CSV work is not spreadsheet work. You open the file, look at it, fix a few cells, maybe sort it or find something, and save it. Spreadsheet apps make you wade through formulas, formatting, charts, and ribbons to do that, and then they quietly mangle your file on the way out.
bedsheet does the small job well. It opens delimited text instantly, gets out of your way, and writes the file back the way it came in. It also looks like something you'd want to keep open.
Reads anything delimited. CSV, TSV, semicolons, pipes. The delimiter, line endings, and encoding are detected on open (UTF-8 with or without BOM, UTF-16, and a Windows-1252 fallback). Files with short rows are padded and you're told about it.
Stays fast. The grid only renders what's on screen, in both directions. A 200,000-row, 14 MB file parses in about 200 ms and searches across 1.6 million cells in about 70 ms. Scrolling stays smooth at any size.
Edits the way you expect. Start typing to replace a cell, press Enter or F2 to edit it, Alt+Enter for a line break inside a cell. Tab and Enter commit and move. Every change is undoable, including sorts and structural changes.
Handles the whole sheet. Range, row, column, and select-all selection. Copy, cut, and paste blocks to and from other apps. Fill down. Insert and delete rows and columns. Rename columns. Sort with type-aware comparison. Resize columns by dragging, or double-click the edge to fit.
Finds and replaces. Matches are highlighted in the grid as you type. Step through them, match case, replace one or all, or show only the rows that match and work on those.
Knows what it's looking at. Numeric columns are detected and right-aligned with tabular figures. Select a block of numbers and the status bar shows sum, average, and count. Multi-line cells show their line breaks inline.
Has a command palette. Ctrl+K lists every command with its shortcut. Right-click menus cover the common cases. Ctrl+/ shows the full keyboard reference.
Follows your desktop. Light and dark themes track the system setting, or pin one.
Recent files, drag and drop to open, and bedsheet file.csv from the terminal.
Grab the package for your distribution from the Releases page.
# Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE
sudo dnf install ./bedsheet-*.x86_64.rpm
# Debian, Ubuntu, Mint
sudo apt install ./bedsheet_*_amd64.deb
# Anything else
chmod +x bedsheet_*.AppImage && ./bedsheet_*.AppImageThe packages register bedsheet as a handler for .csv and .tsv files, so it shows up in
"Open with" in your file manager.
bedsheet # start with the empty sheet
bedsheet export.csv # open a fileEverything is reachable from the keyboard. This is the full set; Ctrl+/ shows it inside the app.
| Moving around | |
|---|---|
| Move | Arrows |
| Extend selection | Shift+Arrows |
| Jump to the edge of the sheet | Ctrl+Arrows |
| Extend to the edge | Ctrl+Shift+Arrows |
| First or last column | Home, End |
| Top-left or bottom-right corner | Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+End |
| Page up or down | PgUp, PgDn |
| Select row, select column, select all | Shift+Space, Ctrl+Space, Ctrl+A |
| Go to row | Ctrl+G |
| Editing | |
|---|---|
| Replace a cell | Just start typing |
| Edit a cell | Enter or F2 |
| Line break inside a cell | Alt+Enter |
| Commit and move down or up | Enter, Shift+Enter |
| Commit and move right or left | Tab, Shift+Tab |
| Cancel | Esc |
| Clear cells | Delete or Backspace |
| Cut, copy, paste | Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V |
| Fill down | Ctrl+D |
| Undo, redo | Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z |
| Rows and columns | |
|---|---|
| Insert row below, insert row above | Ctrl+Enter, Ctrl+Shift+Enter |
| Delete selected rows | Ctrl+Shift+K |
| Insert or delete columns | Right-click a header, or Ctrl+K |
| Rename a column | Double-click its header |
| Resize a column, fit it to content | Drag the header edge, double-click it |
| Sort by a column | Right-click its header |
| Use the first row as the header | Header row toggle in the status bar |
| Finding | |
|---|---|
| Find | Ctrl+F |
| Find and replace | Ctrl+H |
| Next, previous match | Enter, Shift+Enter in the find box, or F3, Shift+F3 |
| Replace all | Ctrl+Enter in the replace box |
| Files and view | |
|---|---|
| Open, save, save as | Ctrl+O, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Shift+S |
| New sheet, close file, quit | Ctrl+N, Ctrl+W, Ctrl+Q |
| Zoom in, out, reset | Ctrl+=, Ctrl+-, Ctrl+0 |
| Command palette | Ctrl+K |
| Keyboard reference | Ctrl+/ |
- Click a row number to select the row, a column header to select the column, the corner to select everything. Shift-click extends. Dragging past the edge scrolls.
- Paste a single value into a multi-cell selection and it fills every cell.
- Paste a block bigger than the sheet and the sheet grows to fit.
- With "only matching rows" on, row numbers stay the real row numbers from the file.
- The delimiter chip in the status bar switches how the file is read, or, once you've made edits, how it will be saved.
- The Mono chip switches cell text to a monospace face. Row numbers are always monospace.
This is the part spreadsheet apps get wrong, so it's the part bedsheet is strict about.
- Values are never reformatted.
007stays007.1,000stays1,000. Dates stay whatever string they were. Alignment and number detection are display-only. - The delimiter is preserved. A semicolon file saves as a semicolon file.
- Line endings are preserved. CRLF in, CRLF out.
- Quoting follows RFC 4180 and only where needed. Fields containing the delimiter, quotes, line breaks, or leading and trailing spaces are quoted. Nothing else is.
- Writes are atomic. The file is written to a temporary sibling and renamed into place, so a crash mid-save can't leave you with half a file.
Two things do change, and you'll know when they do: rows shorter than the widest row are padded with empty cells (you're told on open), and files in UTF-16 or Windows-1252 are saved as UTF-8.
The grid is the product, so everything else is built to recede.
The reference is ledger paper. The surface is a faintly green-tinted paper tone, cells sit on hairline rules, and row numbers are set in a monospace face like a printed ledger. The empty screen is ruled paper with a red margin line, and recent files sit on the lines like entries.
The active cell is outlined in ink black rather than the usual blue, so it reads instantly against any data. Range selection is a soft wash of the single accent color, a verdigris that is used sparingly elsewhere for focus and toggles. Search matches are highlighter yellow, with the current match brighter.
Type is IBM Plex Sans for the interface and for cell text, with tabular figures so numbers line up, and IBM Plex Mono for row numbers and the optional monospace cell mode. Both are bundled, so the app looks the same on every machine.
The window draws its own title bar and corners, so there's no stock toolbar or chrome between you and the sheet. Both themes are designed, not derived; the dark one is a deep green-charcoal rather than gray.
- Tauri 2 provides the window and file access. The Rust side is small: it reads and writes bytes and hands the window over. File contents cross the boundary as raw bytes, not JSON, so large files open without a serialization detour.
- The interface is Svelte 5 and TypeScript.
- The CSV parser is a hand-written RFC 4180 state machine with tests covering quoting, escaped quotes, embedded line breaks, mixed line endings, BOMs, ragged rows, and unterminated quotes.
- The grid is virtualized on both axes and positions cells absolutely, so a million rows cost the same to render as forty.
- Undo is a command stack. Every operation records how to reverse itself, including sorts, which store their permutation.
- The release binary is about 4.6 MB. It uses the system WebKitGTK.
bedsheet opens delimited text. It will not become a spreadsheet. Formulas, charts, pivot tables, multiple sheets, cell formatting, cloud sync, and plugins are out of scope.
Things that might land: column drag-to-reorder, freezing the first column, a wrap-text row
mode, and reading .xlsx files (as import only).
You need Rust (stable), Node 20 or newer, pnpm, and the WebKitGTK development libraries.
# Fedora
sudo dnf install webkit2gtk4.1-devel gtk3-devel librsvg2-devel
# Debian and Ubuntu
sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev build-essential libssl-dev librsvg2-dev
# Arch
sudo pacman -S webkit2gtk-4.1 base-devel librsvgpnpm install
pnpm tauri dev # run with hot reload
pnpm tauri build # .deb, .rpm, and AppImage in src-tauri/target/release/bundle
pnpm test # parser tests
pnpm check # type checkpnpm dev runs the interface alone in a browser, with file access falling back to the
browser's picker and downloads. That's handy for working on the grid.
On distributions with recent binutils, linuxdeploy's bundled strip can't read the system
libraries it copies into the AppImage. If the AppImage step fails, build with
NO_STRIP=true pnpm tauri build. The .deb and .rpm are unaffected.
bedsheet is built and tested on Fedora with GNOME on Wayland. It should run on any Linux desktop with WebKitGTK 4.1.