# medialab/xan

The CSV magician

Repository: https://github.com/medialab/xan
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/xan
Language: Rust
License: Unlicense
License Family: permissive
Topics: cli, csv, rust, tsv
Last push: 2026-07-31T12:15:08+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 95/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 95, release rhythm 92, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 2976, "days_push": 33, "days_rel": 54, "gap_med": 10, "n_releases_24m": 26}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 4484, forks 89 (observed 2026-08-28T04:08:51.179613+00:00)

## What it is
xan is a fast, memory-efficient Rust command line tool for processing, transforming, and exploring CSV/TSV files directly from the shell. It offers composable commands, a tailored expression language, format conversion (JSON, Excel, numpy), and basic terminal data visualizations.

## Use cases
- filter and slice large CSV files from the shell
- aggregate and sort CSV data without loading it into pandas
- convert CSV to JSON or Excel and back
- preview and explore CSV files in the terminal
- draw quick histograms and scatterplots from CSV data
- join multiple CSV files
- process web archival .cdx or bioinformatics .vcf/.gtf files

## When to choose
- you need to wrangle gigabyte-sized CSV files quickly with low memory usage
- you prefer shell pipelines over writing Python scripts for tabular data
- you want fast CSV inspection and simple visualizations in the terminal

## When to avoid
- you need complex statistical modeling or a full dataframe API
- your data is primarily nested JSON rather than tabular
- you need a GUI for data exploration

## Facets
- artifact type: cli-tool
- maturity: active
- function: cli, csv, data-science, parser, data-visualization, etl
- domain: data-science, developer-tools, analytics
- platform: cli, windows, rust, cross-platform
- tags: csv-manipulation, tsv, simd, expression-language, terminal-visualization, xsv-fork, command-line, data-engineering, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- medialab/xan (main) score 95

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:51.179613+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T18:20:30.991793+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/medialab/xan (fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:51.179613+00:00, sha e66775892ef5)
  - registry_crates: https://crates.io/api/v1/crates/xan (fetched 2026-08-29T09:06:43.235420+00:00, sha b5d647b23c3a)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.