Where are visidata options documented?

[CharlesARoy]

I've spent the last two hours trying to figure out how to change the (insanely annoying and impractical) default behavior of Visidata in which it deletes the auto-detected header row when saving a sheet. Why would anyone ever want that behavior, let alone want it as the default?

The only solution I've found for dealing with this so far is to pass the --header 0 option when launching Visidata. ChatGPT suggested that I add options.csv_write_header = True to my .visidatarc file, but that seemingly did nothing.

This makes me wonder, where are the available options that can be set in the visidatarc file documented? All searches for "header" in https://www.visidata.org/docs and www.visidata.org/docs/api did not return any useful information.

[CharlesARoy]

Sorry if that comment is overly salty. More generally, I love Visidata and recommend it to people all the time!

[saulpw]

They are all listed in the manpage (g Ctrl+H or https://visidata.org/man) and in the Options Sheet (Shift+O) and with vd --help on the CLI.

That said, the annoying default behavior sounds really frustrating. If you load a file and immediately save it back out (round-trip), the files should be functionally identical if not byte identical. If this is not true in some case, please open an issue and we'll fix it.

[CharlesARoy]

Thanks @saulpw!

After your response, I confirmed that loading a file and immediately saving it caused the header to be deleted. Then I realized that I was using an old-ish version of Visidata (v2.11) and after updating it to v3.1.1, the issue was fixed.