No shaving off leading zeroes, no assuming I want a formula unless I explicitly prepend the cell with an = (or whatever the syntax is). If I want a string that starts with a hyphen, it’s just a string that starts with a hyphen. If I open a CSV or TSV file and save a copy without doing anything to it, it should be identical to the original down to hashing the same.
But I’d also like the nice auto-filtering capabilities that excel has, where there’s a dropdown on each column for sorting and searching.
Does such a program exist?
You’re describing a tabular data editor, not a spreadsheet which is designed for calculation.
Do you have any tabular data editors to recommend?
Moderncsv or visidata don’t do everything you want, but might merit looks.
I’d start by putting the data in JSON because TSV/CSV is brittle and old.
There are many tools for tabular JSON.
I was going to complain that clearly “spreadsheet” derives from paper-based tabular data editors. But apparently that term was only used consistently after 1906, while digital spreadsheets that aided calculation were conceived of in 1961. Meaning that it has meant a digital calculation aid for longer (65 years) than it only meant a tabular data editor (55 years).