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Discussion (48 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
There are many good attempts to reinvent spreadsheets. We’re doing something different. We don’t want people to adopt a new language or move their work to another format. Instead, we want to improve how the Excel language is run and give people a choice of where to run it.
That’s what we’re building with Nobie: a second Excel-compatible runtime. It’s available as a native Mac app and as a CLI for macOS and Linux. The engine is written from first principles in Rust.
Nobie isn’t done. We are not at Excel parity today. Some features are missing.
We’re a team of four systems engineers. For the next eight weeks, all our work is going into closing those gaps.
Nobie is free and always will be for everything you can do in Excel.
Try it with a real workbook and tell us what breaks. The complicated and ugly ones are especially welcome.
Working w/ .xlsx files shouldn't cost money, and we think people should be able to use their own AI.
We expect to charge orgs/enterprises for a cloud product around governance, and for AI where/when it makes sense. We also plan to make some money when large companies use Nobie for training or to power their products.
Right now, though, we’re entirely focused on making the desktop app and CLI hands down the best xlsx experience in the world. The paid cloud product comes later.
having zero marginal cost is nice and allows us to do things that others can't
https://nobie.com/desktop-app-license-terms
- We can render pixel perfect PNGs and PDFs (native vectorized PDFs)
- You can pass an xlsx, inputs, and output cells, and get a JSON API from any excel workbook
- You can pipe a postgres query into an xlsx file, and then run excel formulas over it
- You can pretty easily setup a `git diff` helper for xlsx files that shows you the changes you care about
- We have a built-in terminal, auto-launchers for Claude and Codex (with some fancy hooks that inject context when you send messages) and a pretty good MCP. After you install Nobie you're agents can do pretty much anything in an xlsx. We also provide a lot of tools that give agents high-signal information about the workbook, so they can quickly get up to speed and do good work
- You can programmatically edit workbooks in pleasant ways, and the workbook will update properly, AND recalc incrementally, AND the numbers will tie with Excel (if they don't definitely let us know, but we've put a huge amount of work into making sure they do)
- There's a bunch of examples on the CLI page on the website, but a lot of previously impossible/very hard things are now pretty trivial with our CLI, and I think this'll be really useful for for a lot of devs (the CLI will be getting better throughout this week, I have a lot more stuff I want to do with this)
- Happy to talk technical details. Everything is from scratch, and our render and calc engines have been a massive amount of work.
Since you offered... I'm curious about the rendering technology behind it. I'm working on a web app with a spreadsheet interface, and I'm using a standard canvas-rendered grid.
You obviously have different design constraints, so it would be interesting to see how they shaped your solution.
You didn't ask a specific question, but it basically comes down to getting really good at calculating layout fast, getting good at figuring out how to incrementally maintain your rendered view, then getting really good at figuring out how to optimally use the hardware you're targeting.
We do not yet support editing print layout, so you can't adjust the pagination / change the page size in / with Nobie yet, but that will come soon :)
See https://nobie.com/cli for the dev focused aspects, but I'm really proud of this thing, and happy that most people will be able to use it for free.
Happy to answer any questions people have.
https://github.com/rush86999/atom/blob/main/backend/core/off...
It can insert columns, for example, but it doesn’t maintain dependencies such as formulas, tables, charts, or defined names when doing so. It also doesn’t evaluate formulas.
Nobie runs the workbook like Excel would: it evaluates formulas, maintains workbook semantics through edits, renders the result, and reads and writes the file.
Roughly speaking, Nobie is to an Excel workbook what V8 is to JavaScript. openpyxl is closer to a parser and serializer.
- Delete `/usr/local/bin/nobie`
- If you're on mac, you also need to delete the .app from `/Applications`
When you use codex / claude in our built-in terminal, the agents get very high signal context about the workbook and what you're doing in it.
As far as I'm aware, Nobie is the the best spreadsheet for agentic use-cases explicitly because they don't have to guess anymore.
You don't need to use AI. We're fine if you just want a really good, free, spreadsheet tool :)
I realise this may be out-of-scope as it's kind of baked into the file format, but does Nobie offer any functionality in that direction?
We an example on our site of how you might use git & nobie together.
It supports all Excel formulas.
The GUI already runs on linux, but we didn't want to muddy the launch page today. It will likely be out this week.
- CSV import can be done today either by using claude / codex and telling them to load the CSV into nobie (we install an MCP on first boot of the app, and we have a really nice built-in terminal, you can click the claude / codex buttons in the top button bar to launch them), or using the CLI. We're working on a GUI workflow for it, but CSV is a cursed format, so we want to do it better than Excel
We're a native app, so you should expect a reasonable app size, 120fps, fast (correct) calcs, all the keyboard shortcuts from Excel, and a pretty UI.
If you're an LLM person, we ship a pretty good MCP, so you can just tell claude/codex to work on the file, and it'll open nobie and update it in front of you (if you use our embedded terminal, you get fancy hooks and context injection from the workbook to make the LLMs smarter, otherwise we have tools that provide some useful context to agents)
We fully support the formula language, and workbook semantics.
The main deficiency we have right now is not letting people create / edit pivot tables. We support what-if scenario analysis, conditional formatting, cycles, lambdas, arrays, spills, lets, etc.
We're going to keep making this thing better and better until people look back on Excel wondering why people ever put up with it.
I hope you'll take Nobie for a spin, and give us whatever feedback comes to mind :)