Open files in VS Code and Cursor / Tables and data

Open a Parquet file in VS Code

Install the free Table Viewer extension and click the .parquet file. It opens as a table with the type of each column in its header. The Schema button shows row groups, compression and key-value metadata. Nothing else has to be installed: no Python, no pandas and no kernel.

Free, MIT license. Extension ID zovo.table-viewer-vscode, version 0.3.3. Needs VS Code 1.90.0 or newer.

Steps in VS Code

1. Install Table Viewer from the Marketplace, or press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on macOS) and run ext install zovo.table-viewer-vscode.
2. Click any .parquet or .pq file in the Explorer. It opens as a table.
3. Click Schema to see physical and logical types, row groups and compression.
4. Sort and filter as in a spreadsheet. Copy a selection as CSV or JSON.

Steps in Cursor, Windsurf or VSCodium

1. Open the Extensions view with Ctrl+Shift+X (Cmd+Shift+X on macOS).
2. Search for zovo.table-viewer-vscode and click Install. Cursor, Windsurf and VSCodium install from Open VSX, where it is published as zovo/table-viewer-vscode.
3. If your editor has no gallery, download the .vsix from the Open VSX page and run "Extensions: Install from VSIX...".
4. Then use it the same way as in VS Code.

What Table Viewer handles

• On an M-series Mac a 1,000,000 row Parquet file loaded in 0.8 s (README screenshot).
• Up to 5,000 columns, drawn only where you look.
• Nested values open as indented JSON in the cell panel.

What it does not do

• Read-only. It loads up to 1,000,000 rows by default and shows a banner when the file has more.
• Very large integers are kept as text so no digits are lost.

Other options

• parquet-viewer (dvirtz.parquet-viewer, 447,971 installs, on Open VSX). Its own description: "Views Apache Parquet files as JSON".
• Data Wrangler (ms-toolsai.datawrangler, 2.4 million installs, not on Open VSX). Opens Parquet through a Python kernel with pandas. Good when you want to transform the data.
• DuckDB. On the command line, duckdb -c "SELECT * FROM 'file.parquet' LIMIT 20" prints the first rows.

Install counts and Open VSX status were checked on 8 November 2026. Descriptions in quotes are the extensions' own.

Questions

More about Table Viewer

Read the Table Viewer page for every feature and setting, or the source code on GitHub.

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