Hey — really impressed with what you've shipped here in five months, especially the MCP server.
One thing that would make TablePro a genuinely complete data tool for me (and I suspect a lot of others): native CSV/TSV inspection, without having to import into a SQLite scratch DB first. Right now the ecosystem split is:
- TablePlus → DB GUI, no real CSV editing
- TableTool → separate app, made by the TablePlus team specifically because TablePlus doesn't do CSVs
- Modern CSV / Tablecruncher / etc. → another separate app
You could collapse that split inside TablePro and have the best single-app story on macOS. The "open a .csv and start poking" workflow is enormously common — log dumps, payroll exports, Stripe/Shopify reports, API CSV responses — and right now even paid TablePlus users are bouncing out to a second app.
For prior art / a possible base to fork from: Tablecruncher went GPL-3.0 in April 2025. It's a mature solo-dev CSV editor (originally a paid macOS app from 2017, then fully open-sourced), C++/FLTK, handles 16M-row / 2 GB files. License is GPL-3 so you'd need to either keep that subsystem AGPL-compatible or rewrite the hot paths in Swift, but the architecture and the years of edge-case handling (encodings, delimiters, quoting weirdness) are all there to learn from.
DuckDB integration you already have for the plugin would also do a lot of the heavy lifting on the query side — duckdb.read_csv_auto() over a memory-mapped file gets you pretty far before you need a custom renderer.
Anyway — thanks for building this in the open, happy to test any prototype.
Hey — really impressed with what you've shipped here in five months, especially the MCP server.
One thing that would make TablePro a genuinely complete data tool for me (and I suspect a lot of others): native CSV/TSV inspection, without having to import into a SQLite scratch DB first. Right now the ecosystem split is:
You could collapse that split inside TablePro and have the best single-app story on macOS. The "open a .csv and start poking" workflow is enormously common — log dumps, payroll exports, Stripe/Shopify reports, API CSV responses — and right now even paid TablePlus users are bouncing out to a second app.
For prior art / a possible base to fork from: Tablecruncher went GPL-3.0 in April 2025. It's a mature solo-dev CSV editor (originally a paid macOS app from 2017, then fully open-sourced), C++/FLTK, handles 16M-row / 2 GB files. License is GPL-3 so you'd need to either keep that subsystem AGPL-compatible or rewrite the hot paths in Swift, but the architecture and the years of edge-case handling (encodings, delimiters, quoting weirdness) are all there to learn from.
DuckDB integration you already have for the plugin would also do a lot of the heavy lifting on the query side —
duckdb.read_csv_auto()over a memory-mapped file gets you pretty far before you need a custom renderer.Anyway — thanks for building this in the open, happy to test any prototype.