Dear Andrés M... Let's reorganize.

[mipmip]

Dear Andrés M.,

You prevented Sc from being forgotten and added great features to the reborn Sc-im. First time I visited your project it had 1K stars, since than the stars have doubled. A lot of people love this unique piece of good old fashioned unix software. Unfortnately the project is standing still and PR's stay open.

You seem to be too busy to invest time into this one-man-project and that's not good for Sc-im. Sc-im deserves to be actively developed by a larger community of enthousiast volunteers. Vim and Neovim are more popular than ever, so now is the moment for Sc-im to grow it's own community.

I'd like to invite you and everyone who is interested to discuss a new form of collaboration so that more people can contribute and the development goes faster. I know a lot of experienced developers would like help or be part of such a project.

Kind regards,
Pim Snel

[andmarti1424]

Yes. That's a good idea. Hope there is more people like you interested in collaborate. I am in

[mipmip]

Wow that's a quick reply. Great to hear you like the idea. 👍

[mipmip]

As you are the founder of this project, your thoughts on how this project should be lead are now most important. Do you have idea's how you think it can be a larger community. And do you have a long term vision on how sc-im should evolve? This thoughts could be part of a mission statement.

[andmarti1424]

Well that's the thing. I do not know how it to become bigger. Do you have any ideas? About scim itself? I think the best would be to give more support.

[mipmip]

There might be templates to convert a personal project into a larger community project. I volunteered in a few projects but I'm not manager myself :)

This might be a could start: https://opensource.guide/starting-a-project/ from section 3.

[mipmip]

I think a good start is too claim an organization name. sc-im is still free, so go on and claim it :) Within an organization it is easy to add volunteers you trust.

[msharov]

You don't need an organization to add volunteers; anybody can already be given write access to the project if that's what's necessary. Neither will volunteers magically appear if there is an "organization" attached. As things stand now, the main issue is more with lack of interest in sc rather than any difficulty in working on it, and that is not a problem we can solve.

[YAMLcase]

I have to lend my support to this idea! I have been on the hunt for a bare-bones, no frills, no formatting spreadsheet app for years and sc-im is the ONLY one available. Bonus (for me) is that it is linux CLI. Thanks @mipmip for the "starting a project" link, this looks like a really good checklist.

[poetaman]

@msharov I think there will be immense interest, I didn't even know if such a thing existed in past. As a programmer, I had never been in love making new spreadsheets before trying sc-im, a CLI spreadsheet program.

We software developers, and nerds forget at times that tools are a human-interface. I think more improvements will only invite more people over time, this program has great potential like vim/neovim. I started working on a Dracula theme for sc-im last night.

@mipmip @andmarti1424 Given I don't see any commits since Sep 4 & there are show-stopper bugs (like #497), I have posted an invitation for enthusiastic developers to chip in on ycombinator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260201 and also posted on neovim (given there is so much commonality with the interface of this program): neovim/neovim#14011. Am not trained in C, so can't dive directly into it myself. Though I can help sponsor this project, and contribute in other ways.

PS: Sample dracula color scheme for sc-im. Am still refining it. Though having an ability to use more colors would definitely be helpful, I have opened another ticket for that: #495

[andmarti1424]

@reportaman That would be great. Hope more people chime in so this piece of software move to another level.

[Iron-E]

also posted on neovim (given there is so much commonality with the interface of this program)

I could see the benefit of using Neovim as a backend. For one, it could potentially allow plugin creation for this application using Lua(!!) which is a big bonus.

I know that Neovim supports creating external UIs on top of it (see :help ui for more info) but I am not sure if it is feasible to create a tabular UI which calls back to Neovim. I am completely unversed in C though, so I don't really have much to offer in terms of concrete solutions.

Hope more people chime in so this piece of software move to another level.

As someone who uses this program pretty frequently, I think a big thing that would help propel it forward is cross-compatibility with :"industry standard" tabular editors such as Excel. If we can somehow get our .sc files to export with formulas intact (kind of hit-or-miss at the moment) that would go a long way towards increasing usability. It's a shame monolithic XML zips have taken over, .sc is a nice format (there might be some benefit to .xlsx I'm not aware of though).

[andmarti1424]

With LUA you can make read and write calls to SC-IM. This could be the communication to other applications.
But again, I would replace the core for something new (remember the evaluation core is from the 80's!)
Something that supports multiple sheets and cross references would be necessary.

About Excel, the thing is in sc-im there are not the same formulas as used on Excel. Nevertheless, the main 8 functions should be exported to .xlsx files without issues (see line 628 of xlsx.c)..

[DarkWiiPlayer]

@andmarti1424 Lua*

[Iron-E]

With LUA you can make read and write calls to SC-IM. This could be the communication to other applications.

I must have forgotten it can already do this. Perhaps making a Neovim plugin for sc-im would actually be more readily doable than I originally thought.

I left a mock on the Neovim issue of something that would be cool to do (rendering tables with sc-im). It'll take me some time to investigate but it would be worth trying IMO.

What you said about reworking the core is probably a good idea if it's that old. Wish I could help more with C but if there were to be a significant rewrite I would advocate for Rust. Again that's all from the perspective of someone who doesn't know the internals or dependencies