Among other things, terminal based programs support flexible remote workflows via ssh and tmux.

Edit: It's slightly off topic, but it might be easier to understand the draw of terminal based interactions in the context of a larger toolchain and workflow. So for example: ssh for remote access, tmux or Emacs for session management and program tiling, ranger or similar for file management, and Emacs or a Vim equivalent for text editing. Mainstream DVCS and build automation tools all provide full functionality via command line. A terminal based spreadsheet program is an obvious fit for such a toolchain.

You can use VNC/RDP to remote into a graphical session. Graphical vs. terminal are both arbitrary binary streams over SSH, the computer doesn't care. There's no advantage to the terminal based one other than maybe less network utilization. I'd resort to that if I were traveling and only had my mobile phone's data as internet.

> You can use VNC/RDP to remote into a graphical session.

I didn't mean to imply that you couldn't. Rather I aimed to provide a broader sense for why someone might find a terminal based spreadsheet program useful.

> There's no advantage to the terminal based one other than maybe less network utilization.

I have to strongly disagree here. My experience with remote graphical environments, even on a wired LAN, has been less than satisfying. I suspect that a large factor for me is the latency; it doesn't take much to make a GUI feel "wrong" to me while a text based interface will just feel slow but not really bother me.

On top of such personal preferences, consider the overhead of running a graphical environment in every container or VM you might happen to make use of.

I'm not a fan of LibreCalc, and I don't know of many other GUI spreadsheet programs for Linux. A terminal-based program is also attractive because it can easily be scripted.

I once had to use sc-im because when I tried to open a ~very~ large file it crashed all the GUI programs I tried.

Gnumeric and Calligra Sheets are 2 other GUI spreadsheets for Linux. Calligra is the name for what used to be the KOffice suite from the KDE project.

I can't speak to the usefulness of either especially since I have no idea what your use case is.

Terminal programs tend to be faster (particularly on boot time) and have better support for keyboard shortcuts. I haven't tried this project out though...

Generally:

   - Quick startup
   - Reasonable RAM usage
   - Well-designed keyboard navigation
   - Conveniently launches from the commandline

You’re pretty much guaranteed to own your data forever. You also don’t have to deal with major UI changes where features are rearranged all the time. It’s also pretty VCS-friendly.

> You’re pretty much guaranteed to own your data forever.

Don't I have that with Excel too, in practice?

I’m not sure. Two observations:

I have dozens of Word documents created on Windows in the mid-90s that current Word versions refuse to open.

Excel for Mac keeps subtly adding four years to every date field if the file was originally created in Excel for Windows.

I guess in the case where you don’t have access to a desktop environment.

I’m also curious to know if there’s a reason to use this if you do have access to a gui...

Speed. Simplicity. All you want to do is update a single value or insert a row into a spreadsheet? You can probably be done using the terminal application before Excel even finishes opening.

On my computers, I use Excel so rarely--around once a month or so-- and do full reboots so rarely that it always interrupts me as soon as I open it to finish applying an update to office. And of course, since I'm on Windows, Excel has locked the file (usually just a csv, but one with a dozen or more columns, so hard to do with a text editor) so nothing else can open it in the meantime, and I have to wait several minutes for the modal popup to go away before I can finish appending a timestamp to the end of the file.