Tless is a utility to quickly view tabular text data. It was inspired by 'less' and acts in a similar capacity for tables. To this end, it offers several essential features.

Tless is aware of the concept of a table "column" and operates in two dimensions instead of just one. Accordingly, it allows convenient movement and searches using both rows and columns.
Rows are parsed on the fly in a customizable manner. The input may be delimited, fixed width, or csv.

Rows and columns may be frozen and unfrozen dynamically. Tless performs synchronized scrolling with these (frozen columns only scroll vertically and frozen rows only scroll horizontally). This allows a user to scan through a large file of data, both horizontally and vertically, without losing sight of any header rows or index columns. Because the frozen rows and columns need not be consecutive, Tless offers more flexibility than a typical split-screen application.

Tless examines a file locally and uses a caching mechanism. Like 'less', it can be used to view very large files (in both directions) with minimal start-up time, performance loss, or memory foot-print. It uses curses and is a terminal application for both portability and speed.

Note that tless is a viewing utility. Although it provides basic search functionality, it is not a spreadsheet or database and allows no editing, calculation, or DB style queries. It can be thought of as a lightweight two dimensional data viewer.