CSV Table Editor — Encoding & History

Open, view and edit .csv and .tsv files as an editable grid inside VS Code, with first-class encoding support and a persistent save history you can diff and roll back to.

Features

Edit as a grid

• Opens CSV/TSV files in a spreadsheet-like grid — no external tools.
• Inline cell editing; add or remove rows and columns.
• Full undo/redo through the standard Cmd/Ctrl+Z / Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Z.

Pick your encoding

Auto-detects the encoding from the byte-order mark on open, and lets you reopen or save with any of these via the clickable encoding label in the toolbar:

• UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM
• UTF-16 LE, UTF-16 BE
• Shift_JIS, EUC-JP
• Windows-1252, Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)
• GBK, Big5, EUC-KR
• Windows-1258 (Vietnamese)

Search, sort and headers

• Cmd/Ctrl+F search across every cell with match highlighting and navigation.
• Automatic header-row detection, keeping any metadata preamble above the table.
• Three-state column sort (ascending → descending → original). Sorting is view-only — it never reorders the data written back to disk.
• Excel-style row and column highlighting for the selected cell.

History and diff

• Every save is captured as a version (the last 50 are kept), stored in the extension's global storage — not as stray files next to your CSV.
• Open the History panel from the toolbar to browse past versions.
• Compare any version with the current content in a side-by-side table diff that highlights added, removed and changed rows.
• Roll back to a version as unsaved changes, so you review before overwriting.

Usage

1. Open any .csv or .tsv file — it opens in the grid editor by default. To switch an already-open file, use View: Reopen Editor With… and pick CSV Table Editor.
2. Click a cell to edit. Use the toolbar buttons to add rows/columns.
3. Click the encoding label in the toolbar to reopen or save with a different encoding.
4. Click History to view, diff, or roll back to a previous save.
5. Press Cmd/Ctrl+S to save.

Requirements

No additional setup. Encoding conversion is handled by the bundled iconv-lite library.

Known limitations

• Sorting and header detection are heuristic; a header can be one row off on unusual files.
• The table diff compares serialized CSV text, so purely formatting-level differences (quoting style) may show as changes.
• History is keyed by file path — renaming or moving a file starts a fresh history.

License

MIT