A JTable for emacs, because it's about time there's a solid, reusable, and flexible enough table rendering package for emacs.

Many packages in emacs simply show you tabular data (ibuffer, dired, many help views). If a third party wants to implement a table view, they also have to reimplement all the formatting, sorting, column ordering, editing features, because the existing solutions are utterly inflexible. This package is modeled after JTable and friends, a part of Java swing GUI system. Swing has a fame of being overly abstract and difficult to use, but with proper default implementations (and it provides plenty) it is very simple to use and very flexible to extend, just in the emacs spirit!

ETable uses strict separation of view and data. Views are only concerned with displaying "abstract data", while these are provided by Model objects. This can be viewed as a variation of MVC design pattern.

Here's a screenshot showing off some features:

This package is not concerned with tables in the org mode sense (that is to serve as an intermediate format for tabular data for later export/processing). The first and foremost goal is to provide a framework to present data to the user, enable her to filter, sort, search, select and copy the data, edit cells, reorder columns and just do all the things we are used to from the classic GUI interfaces. A possible use-case is display of directory data (aka dired), buffers (aka ibuffer), or any other tabular data, where the org markup would be needless and outright confusing/inconvenient.

If you are familiar with JTable and swing (or philosophically similar framework) and want to contribute to this project, please email me or start an issue so we can dicuss what work needs to be done to minimze the possibility of several people doing the same work.