How does multi-line cell content work?

[chwt]

Appreciating if someone could provide some examples / screenshots how that would look like? Should it also display multi-line text when in v mode?

(Currently when adding multi-line input via external editor, I don't see it displayed as such. Further, on reopen wrong new rows are shown instead.)

[midichef]

I believe multi-line display is for showing a cell that has a single long line of content, by wrapping it across multiple lines. It's not for editing a cell to make it take up more than 1 line. For example, if your goal is to put "a\nb\nc\n" in a single cell and have it consistently be displayed as 3 lines, I do not think visidata has that ability.

You say you reopen the file and see wrong new rows. What is the filetype?

I can imagine such a problem happening in a filetype like tsv, because as saulpw has said, quoted newlines aren't allowed in 'true' tsv files. For tsv, if you add newlines in a cell and then save it, that will create new rows at the added newlines. But for csv files, you should be able to add newlines that keep their formatting upon saving and reloading.

[asteroidb612]

I also tried using the external editor to put newlines into a table, and I see dots where newlines would be:

This looks the same after writing to a csv file and loading that file back in.

[saulpw]

This is intentional, to be able to show as much content as possible on one line (using options.disp_oddspace). Use v to toggle multiline display which will be closer to what is expected. However, even then, it's capped at options.disp_max_wrap_lines and the last line will again show as much content as possible.