Support for assisted table creation

[tlnagy]

One of the most annoying things about writing pandoc markdown is table creation. It would be super nice if vim-pandoc had some kind of assistance while creating tables, e.g. insertion of new columns, new rows easily, pasting column-wise into the table, etc. Currently, I have to read in data using Python's Pandas package and print the table using https://bitbucket.org/astanin/python-tabulate. Then I copy it over to vim, but the whole procedure is very annoying for small tables.

I realize that this is a big request and will probably require quite a bit of thought on how to best implement it.

[fmoralesc]

This has been requested before, and it is indeed quite a undertaking. I think, however, if we were to tackle this, it would be for the best if we developed this feature as a separate plugin, because it could be useful for many, even if they don't use vim-pandoc. I don't think I can begin such work atm, but I am very open to at least discuss it further.

Thanks for the heads up in re: python-tabulate, I'll check it out.

[dfaligertwood]

dhruvasagar/vim-table-mode already implements a vim table mode. Use with pandoc is described in issue dhruvasagar/vim-table-mode#31, and although it is currently incomplete I believe @dhruvasagar is looking into adding header support as detailed in that issue.

It might be useful if vim-pandoc could disable line-wrap in table-mode sections, though.

[fmoralesc]

@dfaligertwood Thanks for the heads up in re: vim-table-mode. I'll check that suggestion out; it should be possible to adapt the smart autoformatting method to do it.

[tlnagy]

@dfaligertwood 👍 great find! This is why I love vim, so many great tools.

[tlnagy]

It would be very helpful if you disabled smart autoformatting when using vim-table-mode or when building tables in general. Smart formatting breaks tables while you create them.

[dhruvasagar]

If there's an API to disable it, it could also be done by Table Mode while it's enabled.

[fmoralesc]

I think the problem is we need to disable autoformatting when the current line might start a new table, right? Autoformatting should be disabled for tables by default even now.

So I think there's two requirements:

1. Add a toggle to autoformatting, so it can be called by the user or by a plugin (as @dhruvasagar mentioned)
2. Disable autoformatting on lines which might need it.

2 could be slow, because we would need to check every time the user inserts text.

[tlnagy]

Option 1 is probably the better way to go. We could deactivate autoformat whenever someone enters table mode, which would be probably be relatively easy while still solving this problem.

Option 2 would be much harder and I have a hard time imagining anyone wanting to edit markdown tables (even simple ones) without the help of a plugin like vim-table-mode.

[fmoralesc]

Implemented some switch-functions for enabling/disabling/toggling autoformatting temporarily for a buffer. This, alongside commit bbbc13b should improve the behavior of the plugin on tables.

The main problematic case right now is when creating a table. For example (^ indicates the cursor position),

-----
a
 ^

gets autoformatted to

-----a
      ^

because neither ----- nor a are identified as being in a table, so autoformatting gets enabled, as is default for regular text. Perhaps a check could improve this situation.

[fmoralesc]

An update: I proposed @dhruvasagar to create a couple of User events on enabling and disabling of table mode, which he introduced in his plugin. So now, to toggle auto-formatting on those events, one can use

au User TableModeEnabled call pandoc#formatting#DisableAutoformat()
au User TableModeDisabled call pandoc#formatting#EnableAutoformat()

This is available as a submodule in vim-pandoc-after, so users of that can simply add "tablemode" to the g:pandoc#after#modules#enabled list.