excelano/xled

xled — sed and awk for tabular data

xled brings the muscle memory of sed and awk to CSV and DSV files. It borrows awk's field model, sed's s/// substitution, and ed's live in-memory buffer, and points all three at Excel-style ranges: a column by letter or name, a row span, a rectangle, a regex-selected set of cells. You address part of the table, you give it a command, and it shows you the result before anything is written.

Project page: https://excelano.com/xled/ · Tutorial: an introduction

# strip the currency formatting from the price column, in place
xled '[price] s/[$,]//g' products.csv

# derive a tax-inclusive total, rounded like money
xled '[total] = round(num([price]) * 1.0825, 2)' products.csv

Why

Spreadsheets that arrive as CSV are full of small, repetitive damage: a dollar sign glued to every number, a leading apostrophe, inconsistent casing, a column that should be split, a header buried under three title rows. The reach for these is usually a throwaway pandas script or a fragile awk -F, one-liner that mishandles the first quoted comma. xled is the tool in between: faithful CSV parsing, two-dimensional addressing that matches how you already think about a sheet, and a transform vocabulary small enough to keep in your head.

It is deliberately not a query engine. xled rewrites cells and reshapes nothing — it never adds or removes rows behind your back, never reorders columns, never coerces a value you didn't ask it to. Join, group, aggregate, and multi-predicate query belong to SQL; xled hands those off to xql rather than growing into them.

Install

Every install line below ends with xled --install-skill. That installs the Claude Code skill alongside the binary, which is the one step people reliably skipped when it lived further down the page. Drop it if you do not use Claude Code — the CLI itself does not need it.

Debian and Ubuntu

Add the Excelano apt repository once (one-time setup):

curl -fsSL https://excelano.com/apt/setup.sh | sudo sh

Then install it, so apt upgrade keeps it current:

sudo apt install xled && xled --install-skill

Both amd64 and arm64 packages ship with every release.

Homebrew

On macOS or Linux, tap and trust the repository once — Homebrew gates third-party taps behind explicit trust (one-time setup):

brew tap excelano/tap
brew trust excelano/tap