Why Omasheet

For some time now, I have had a hankering to write a new Spreadsheet Application. Sure, Microsoft(r) Excel(r) is ubiquitous and a standard. Google Sheets, LibraOffice, Apple Numbers, etc. have all followed suit over the years. So why bother?

Over this time I’ve learned some data science tools, specifically Apache Arrow and Rust Polars. I’ve worked with GitHub markdown and text diffs. And I’ve discovered exact math support such as the Rust BigRational library. In this light, in this era the Spreadsheet clearly needs a major rethink.

But the incumbents, with a mass of casual users, have no incentive to fix it.

So, I made a wishlist of the things I wanted:

• ease of use
• markdown friendly
• strongly typed
• exact maths
• columnar data
• fast queries
• code oriented
• AI driven

(a partial list btw!)

Until now, I have been put off by the effort needed to write a quality application that would stand comparison.

Getting to grips with Claude Code has changed all that! Now the cost to develop something of comparable quality is much lower. And improving all the time.

And then, I heard about DHH’s Omarchy OS - an OS for the AI era without the “keep out” signs everywhere for AI developed code.

And I thought - perhaps the world is finally ready to step away from Excel and its derivatives, and Omarchy is an open field for new ideas and applications.

So here we are … starting the journey with Omasheet.

Please do try it - click Getting Started. Feedback, collaboration and issues are welcome in the GH repo.

~librasteve

PS. Click on feed below if you would like to hear more about the unqiue qualities of Omasheet…