A terminal UI for interactively querying tabular files (Parquet, CSV, and anything else DuckDB can read) with a live SQL editor and scrollable results — all in the terminal.

What it does

Open a file, write a SQL query against it (the file is exposed as the view df), and press Ctrl+R to run it. Results are shown in a scrollable table with column names and types in the header.

That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

What it looks like

Keybindings

Key	Action
`Ctrl+R`	Run query
`Ctrl+W`	Toggle output wrap
`Ctrl` + Arrow keys	Scroll results
`Esc`	Quit

Building

You need Rust installed (stable toolchain).

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/ducktabe
cd ducktabe
cargo build --release

The binary will be at target/release/ducktabe.

Linux

cargo build --release
./target/release/ducktabe --file path/to/your/file.parquet

macOS

cargo build --release
./target/release/ducktabe --file path/to/your/file.parquet

Windows

cargo build --release
.\target\release\ducktabe.exe --file path\to\your\file.parquet

On Windows, make sure you're running inside Windows Terminal for proper terminal rendering.

A note on LLM usage

The SQL test data generation script (src/tests/generate_data.sql) and the initial version of this README were created with the help of Claude. However, all other code in this repository is completely handwritten - the intent was for me to build a simple, usable tool for myself in Rust, while learning a good amount of it.