Although spreadsheet applications for editing CSV files on the console used to be one of the earliest killer applications for personal computers, only few of them and even less documentation about them is still actively maintained.

After having done extensive search on the web, manpages and source code, I ended up with the following three applications that all have fundamental drawbacks:

• sc: abbrev. for spreadsheet calculator; nice tool with vi keybings, but it does not put strings containing the delimiter into quotas when exporting to delimiter separated format and can't import csv files correctly, i.e. all numbers are interpreted as strings
• GNU oleo: doesn't seem to be actively maintained any longer since 2001 and there are therefore no packages for major linux distributions
• teapot: offers packages for various operating systems, but uses for example counter-intuitive naming for cells (numbers for row and column, i.e. 11 seems to be intended to be row 1, column 1) and superfluous code for FLTK GUI

Various Emacs modes also do not quote strings containing the delimiter well or are require much more typing for entering the scaffold of a table.

Therefore I would be very grateful for overcoming one of theses drawbacks or any hints towards another console based CSV editor. It actually needn't do any calculations just editing cells or column- and rowise.