xled Excelano LLC

Use this command to install xled:

winget install --id=Excelano.xled -e

sed and awk for tabular data, regex and compute over CSV and DSV ranges

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

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

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

Then install it, so brew upgrade keeps it current:

brew install xled

Windows

With WinGet, so winget upgrade keeps it current:

winget install Excelano.xled

Or run the standalone installer in PowerShell:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://github.com/excelano/xled/releases/latest/download/xled-installer.ps1 | iex"

Prebuilt binary (Linux and macOS)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/excelano/xled/main/install.sh | sh

The installer downloads the right tarball for your platform from the GitHub release, verifies its checksum, and drops the binary into ~/.cargo/bin (or the equivalent on Windows). If xled isn't found on your PATH afterward, ensure ~/.cargo/bin is on it. Releases also ship raw tarballs (xled-*.tar.xz / .zip) for manual installation. To uninstall:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/excelano/xled/main/uninstall.sh | sh

That removes the binary from ~/.cargo/bin; you can also just rm ~/.cargo/bin/xled.

Cargo

If you have a Rust toolchain, install the published crate from crates.io. This compiles from source rather than fetching a prebuilt binary, so it is slower than the installer above but needs nothing else:

cargo install xled

Build from source

xled requires only a Rust toolchain. Four pure-Rust crates carry the load (regex, csv, clap, rustyline); there are no C dependencies and no runtime.

cd xled
cargo build --release

The binary is at target/release/xled.

Three ways to run it

xled '