Opening a file
Columnar supports three ways to open a file.
File menu
Section titled “File menu”Click File → Open File… in the native menu bar, or press Ctrl+O (Cmd+O on macOS). A file picker will open — select any .csv or .tsv file.
Open button
Section titled “Open button”Click the Open button in the top-right corner of the window. This is equivalent to using the menu.
Drag and drop
Section titled “Drag and drop”Drag a .csv or .tsv file from your file manager and drop it anywhere on the Columnar window. The file will load immediately.
What happens when you open a file
Section titled “What happens when you open a file”Columnar does not load the entire file into memory. Instead it does an index pass — a single scan through the file that records the byte position of every row. During this pass you will see a progress indicator:
Indexing… 1,234 / 14,000 MB (8%)Once indexing is complete, the grid appears and you can start scrolling immediately. Rows are parsed from disk on demand as you scroll — only the visible rows are ever in memory at one time.
How long does indexing take?
Section titled “How long does indexing take?”| File size | Approximate time |
|---|---|
| Under 100 MB | Under 1 second |
| 1 GB | 2–5 seconds |
| 14 GB | 20–30 seconds |
| 50 GB+ | 1–2 minutes |
Times vary depending on disk speed. SSD is significantly faster than HDD.
Opening a second file
Section titled “Opening a second file”Opening a new file while one is already loaded replaces the current file. Columnar supports one file at a time per window. The previous file is closed and the new one is indexed.
Recent files
Section titled “Recent files”Files you open are saved to a recent files list accessible via File → Recent Files. See the recent files guide for details.