/go-elastictable

Elastic terminal table that resizes to adapt terminal width

Primary LanguageGoMIT LicenseMIT

go-elastictable Build Status Go Report Card godoc

Go command line tables with elastic column resizing to adapt terminal width.

Approach

Naive algorithms simply take width-of-table/width-of-terminal and apply a uniform factor to grow/shrink the columns. This results in shoddy output, small columns become worse when wrapped.

This library optimizes for visual balance by doing the following:

  • Closely pack wrapped lines:

    # don't:
| don't waste whitespace in the second |
| line                                 |

# do:
| when wrapping a column |
| try to pack the lines  |
| as closely as possible |

  • Balance row heights:

    # don't:
| COL-1       | COL-2       | COL-3       |
+-------------+-------------+-------------+
| small col   | small col   | really big  |
|             |             | column that |
|             |             | spans many  |
|             |             | rows        |

# do:
| COL-1 | COL-2 | COL-3                   |
+-------+-------+-------------------------+
| small | small | really big column that  |
| col   | col   | spans many rows         |

  • Number of lines depends on wrapping behavior and is hard to predict in advance. So instead of fully computing expensive re-wraps for every pass, it rather just guesses the number of lines using simple rune widths. This works well in most cases, except there will be some trade-offs in certain scenarios.

Compatibility Note

This library is currently under active development. Please use a dependency manager (like godep) to pin specific commit versions.