On Wed, May 17, 2006 at 04:52:50PM -0400, cga2000 wrote:
> Does vim provide any form of native support for drawing tables?
>
> I have tried a couple of plugins and they don't seem to play well with
> my setup, presumably because I have temporarily switched my locale back
> from UTF-8 to en_US (due to problems with other applications that do are
> not yet utf8-ready).
>
> When in UTF-8 I was able to manually draw nice-looking tables to dress
> up text that I had previously formatted in rows and columns by using
> digraphs (Ctrl+K hh/vv etc..) and though there were some issues with
> printing I was all-in-all quite happy.
>
> The functionalities I had in mind would probably do something like this:
>
> 1. Assist text entry by letting you define tab stops,
> 2. Let you select a column of text and justify it,
> 3. Provide some means of inserting vertical lines at each tab stop,
> 4. Assist in creating horizontal lines by adding the ad hoc character
> where a vertical and a horizontal line intersect,
> 5. Reformat the table frame when box drawing characters are not
> available (replacing line intersections by '+' for instance).
>
> But then again I have little experience with vim and there is probably
> a "vim way" of doing this that I have not even imagined. So I am open
> to better strategies.
You mention trying some plugins, but you did not say which ones, so
I do not know if you have already tried these suggestions.
For (1) see my other post on this thread. I think that Dr. C's
Align plugin can do (2) and his DrawIt plugin can help with the rest.
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=294
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=40
HTH --Benji Fisher
