CSV Color Highlighting in Sublime Text with rainbow_csv

Published: October 23, 2018

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If you’re a developer, I’d be willing to wage a bet on the following…

  • From time-to-time you work with data in CSV files
  • You don’t particularly enjoy working with Microsoft Excel

At least for my self, I know these two statements are true.

For the longest time I hadn’t thought to look for ways to improve the experience of working with CSV data in my text editor. Somehow the idea came into my mind recently.

This brought me to the rainbow_csv Sublime Text plugin. Installing it has been a game changer for me.

The plugin does more than just color highlighting, but that’s the only feature I care about.

Here’s an example of the highlighting in a CSV in the Magento code base which contains pricing data.

Screenshot showing rainbow_csv highlighting for advanced pricing csv data

For any developers that use Sublime Text, I highly recommend this plugin.

For any developers that don’t use Sublime text I highly recommend finding a similar plugin for your text editor of choice.

Max Chadwick Hi, I'm Max!

I'm a software developer who mainly works in PHP, but loves dabbling in other languages like Go and Ruby. Technical topics that interest me are monitoring, security and performance. I'm also a stickler for good documentation and clear technical writing.

During the day I lead a team of developers and solve challenging technical problems at Rightpoint where I mainly work with the Magento platform. I've also spoken at a number of events.

In my spare time I blog about tech, work on open source and participate in bug bounty programs.

If you'd like to get in contact, you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.