# Highly recommend Visidata for viewing Qiime2 files on the CLI

**URL:** https://forum.qiime2.org/t/highly-recommend-visidata-for-viewing-qiime2-files-on-the-cli/33300
**Category:** Other Bioinformatics Tools
**Created:** [June 12, 2025, 2:02am UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/highly-recommend-visidata-for-viewing-qiime2-files-on-the-cli/33300 "2025-06-12T02:02:33Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![charlesalexandreroy](https://forum.qiime2.org/user_avatar/forum.qiime2.org/charlesalexandreroy/32/20974_2.png) [@charlesalexandreroy](https://forum.qiime2.org/u/charlesalexandreroy)
#### Post date: [June 12, 2025, 2:02am UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/highly-recommend-visidata-for-viewing-qiime2-files-on-the-cli/33300/1 "2025-06-12T02:02:33Z")

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Hi all,

I'm not seeing any discussion of [Visidata](https://www.visidata.org/) on the forum, so I just wanted to bring attention to it because IMO it's a must-have when working with Qiime2 .qza/.qzv files on the command line (and for CLI work more generally). It's one of those tools that you wish you had heard about years ago and can't live without once you start using it.

I'd sort of describe Visidata as Excel for the command line, but it might be even more powerful. It can display, convert, and manipulate pretty much any file format you can think of, and it's super fast.

After installing, you can simply type `vd <your_qza_or_qzv_file>` and, without knowing anything about those extensions, it will properly guess that they are zip files and allow you to browse their contents. You can then easily summarize the data, save it in a different format (e.g., save a CSV file as a TSV file), and so much more.

Here's a quick demo of me looking at a FeatureData[DifferentialAbundance] qza file:

![2025-06-10 19.10.39](https://forum-qiime2-org.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/original/3X/4/e/4e8c5cb03519f1c186631285d0cd072339715f0d.gif)

And here's [a far more compelling demo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU) from almost a decade ago(!) — the tool has come a long way since then.

And [a short list of (some) things you can do with Visidata](https://www.visidata.org/blog/2020/ten/).

I hope it can benefit some people!

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### Author: ![colinbrislawn](https://forum.qiime2.org/user_avatar/forum.qiime2.org/colinbrislawn/32/6221_2.png) [@colinbrislawn](https://forum.qiime2.org/u/colinbrislawn)
#### Post date: [June 12, 2025, 2:02am UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/highly-recommend-visidata-for-viewing-qiime2-files-on-the-cli/33300/2 "2025-06-12T02:02:41Z")

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### Author: ![ebolyen](https://forum.qiime2.org/user_avatar/forum.qiime2.org/ebolyen/32/11_2.png) [@ebolyen](https://forum.qiime2.org/u/ebolyen)
#### Post date: [June 12, 2025, 5:46pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/highly-recommend-visidata-for-viewing-qiime2-files-on-the-cli/33300/5 "2025-06-12T17:46:48Z")

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