Another morning, another moderately (but pleasantly) surprising move in the Linux development storyline. In the big 2026, Linux is definitively fixing its support for the GD-ROM driver, which is used by Sega Dreamcast.

Sega what?

For context, Sega Dreamcast is a gaming console made by Sega and released in 1999. At the time, Sega came up with a proprietary disc format called GD-ROM, which could store more data than a normal, everyday CD-ROM disc. This gave Sega an edge in their game storage as well as performance.

Even though it had to take on a giant opponent, the PlayStation 2, Sega did well with its Dreamcast. It had a robust set of titles to start with, like "Jet Set Radio," "Phantasy Star Online," "Crazy Taxi," "Sonic Adventure," and "Soul Calibur." It had equally robust hardware, with a unique controller and a proper arcade feel that the people got attached to. The Dreamcast still, however, maintains a cult following, with new titles being developed for it even now.

The power of open source community

The unsurprisingly brilliant part of all this is the endurance that open source development has always shown, and still shows. The arrival of support for something that was fresh almost 27 years ago now, with only an infinitesimal part of the community asking for it is not a minor feat, it is a testament to the core philosophies of FOSS. The beautiful cornerstone principle of open source software is that it exists mostly and purely because the developers want good software to exist. There are no bounds to the whimsy and personal gratification that they can bring.

It has been known that Linux gives a second life to old hardware, making it usable when the software that it came with has already discarded the possibilities. Posts about revival of old hardware with Linux to make them into something usable, like servers or media centers or so on are very commonplace on platforms like Reddit. That extends not only to personal computers, as we can see, but also specialized hardware, like the Sega Dreamcast.

Even though there have been some recently drastic support drops on Linux, such as the abandonment of support for floppy disks, or the plan of dropping support for i486 processors starting from Linux 7.1, the extension of support for old technology is not an old phenomenon for Linux. The shift is perspective comes when you realize that even though these things are dropped from the main kernel, there are versions of Linux still on the internet, and still being actively supported that keep the "obsolete" hardware going.

Linux for the retro future

Linux has a rich community for retro gaming, with entire distributions like RetroArch dedicated to it. There are simulators for all kinds of old gaming consoles and platforms, and most of the old controllers and even their cheap generic rip-offs are mostly supported by Linux. Combined with cheap (debatable?) hardware like the Raspberry Pi and the distribution RetroPie, you can really make a platform for yourself.

All-in-all, it is always a good day in Linux-land when we get more support for more enthusiast-oriented projects and hardware. To not let worthy old hardware die out is the greatest emotional and technical gift that its users can receive and well, Linux provides. Cheers 🥂

You can totally read CSV files in the terminal. After all, it's a text file. You can use cat and then parse it with the column command.

That works. No doubt. But it is hard to scan and certainly not easy to follow.

I came across a tool that made CSV files look surprisingly beautiful in the terminal.

That looks gorgeous, isn't it? That is the magic of Tennis. No, not the sport, but a terminal tool I recently discovered.

Meet Tennis: CSV file viewing for terminal junkies

Okay... cheesy heading but clearly these kinds of tools are more suitable for people who spend considerable time in the terminal. Normal people would just use an office tool or simple text editor for viewing CSV file.

But a terminal dweller would prefer something that doesn't force him to come out of the terminal.

Tennis does that. Written in Zig, displays the CSV files gorgeously in a tabular way, with options for a lot of customization and stylization.

You don't necessarily need to customize it, as it automatically picks nice colors to match the terminal. As you can see, clean, solid borders and playful colors are visible right upfront.

Things you can do with Tennis

Let me show you various styling options available in this tool.

Row numbering

You can enable the numbering of rows on Tennis using a simple -n flag at the end of the command:

tennis samplecsv.csv -n

This can be useful when dealing with larger files, or files where the order becomes relevant.

Adding a title

You can add a title to the printed CSV file on the terminal, with a -t argument, followed by a string that is the title itself:

tennis samplecsv.csv -t "Personal List of Historically Significant Songs"

The title is displayed in an extra row on top. Simple enough.

Table width

You can set a maximum width to the entire table (useful if you want the CSV file not to occupy the entire width of the window). To do so, use the -w tag, followed by an integer that will display the maximum number of characters that you want the table to occupy.

tennis samplecsv.csv -w 60

As you can see, compared to the previous images, this table has shrunk much more. The width of the table is now 60 characters, no more.

Changing the delimiter

The default character that separates values in a CSV file is (obviously) a comma. But sometimes that isn't the case with your file, and it could be another character like a semicolon or a $, it could pretty much be anything as long as the number of columns is the same for every row present. To print a CSV file with a "+" for a delimiter instead, the command would be:

tennis samplecsv.csv -d +

As you can see, the change of the delimiter can be well specified and incorporated into the command.

Color modes

By default, as mentioned in the GitHub page, Tennis likes to be colorful. But you can change that, depending on the --color flag. It can be on, off or auto (which mostly means on).

tennis samplecsv.csv --color off

Here's what it looks like with the colors turned off.

Digits after decimal

Sometimes CSV files involve numbers that are long floats, being high precision with a lot of digits after a decimal point. While printing it out, if you don't wish to see all of them, but only to a certain extent, you use the --digits flag:

tennis samplecsv.csv --digits 3

As you can see on the CSV file printed with cat, the rating numbers have a lot of digits after the decimal points, all more than 3. But specifying the numbers caused Tennis to shorten it down.

Themes

Tennis usually picks the theme from the colors being used in the terminal to gauge if it is a dark or a light theme, but you can change that manually with the --theme flag. Since I have already been using the dark theme, let's see what the light theme looks like:

Doesn't look like much at all in a terminal with the dark theme, which means it is indeed working! The accepted values are dark, light and auto (which again, gauges the theme based on your terminal colors).

Vanilla mode

In the vanilla mode, any sort of numerical formatting is abolished entirely from the printing of the CSV file. As you can see in the images above, rather annoyingly, the year appears with a comma after the first number because the CSV file is wrongly assuming that that is a common sort of number and not a year. But if I do it with the --vanilla flag:

tennis samplecsv.csv --vanilla

The numerical formatting of the last row is turned off. This will work similarly with any other sort of numbers you might have in your CSV file.

Quick commands (you are more likley to use)

Here's the most frequently used options I found with Tennis:

tennis file.csv # basic view
tennis file.csv -n # row numbers
tennis file.csv -t "Title"
tennis file.csv -w 60
tennis file.csv --color off

I tried it on a large file

To check how Tennis handles larger files, I tried it on a CSV file with 10,000 rows. There was no stutter or long gap to process the command, which will obviously vary from system to system, but it doesn't seem like there is much of a hiccup in the way of its effectiveness even for larger files.

That's just my experience. You are free to explore on your system.

Not everything worked as expected

While Tennis looks impressive, not everything works as advertised yet.

Some features listed on GitHub simply didn’t work in my testing, even after trying multiple installation methods.

For example, there is a --peek flag, which is supposed to give an overview of the entire file, with the size, shape and other stats. A --zebra flag is supposed to give it an extra layer of alternated themed coloring. There are --reverse and --shuffle flags to change the order of rows, and --head and --tail flags to print the only first few or last few rows respectively. There are still more, but again, unfortunately, they do not work.

Getting started with Tennis

Tennis can be installed in three different ways, one is to build from source (obviously), second to download the executable and place it in one of the directories in your PATH (which is the easiest one), and lastly using the brew command (which can indeed be easier if you have homebrew installed on your system).

The instructions for all are listed here. I suggest getting the tar.gz file from the release page, extracting it and then using the provided executable in the extracted folder.

There is no Flatpak or Snap or other packages available for now.

Final thoughts

While the features listed in the help page work really well, all the features listed on the website do not, and that discrepancy is a little disappointing, but something that we hope gets fixed in the future.

So altogether, it is a good tool for printing your CSV files in an engaging way, to make them more pleasing to look at.

While a terminal lover find such tools attractive, it could also be helpful in cases where you are reviewing exported data from a script or you have to deal with csv files on servers.

If you try Tennis, don't forget to share the experience in the comment section.

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