Compose, rarely. Read and edit with plain text editor, it's common.

I did it like three times already today.

What editor did you use?

vim / sublime text, depending on context.

I do a lot of troubleshooting using CLI tools like grep and wc.

I do quite a bit for GitHub markdown tables, for making small annotations for ML, for python parsing, etc. Very common and would be annoying too open up excel every time I needed some csv.

I thought markdown tables used the pipe character as the delimiter between table columns.

Also, is not necessary to use excel, and a lot of the issues brought up in the article wouldn't be the case with a different delimiter character. Editors could easily be updated to make entering that delimiter character easier to enter by mapping it to a key like tab whenever a file like that is opened.

It just seems like a problem that could be solved, but can't be due to inertia.

> I thought markdown tables used the pipe character as the delimiter between table columns.

Markdown (the original one by John Gruber) does not include any syntax for tables. Other implementations have included it, but there is no standard. As far as I know, using the pipe character to separate columns is indeed quite common, but it is not the only way.

In my experience, they'll have a database that they administrate through excel, then output it as CSV for whatever tool that needs to process it.