tblui.el

Define tabulated-list based UI easily.

How to Install

Available on MELPA. Or, you can clone this repo and put it on your loadpath.

Motivation

tabulated-list is the official library which implements basic functionality for table like buffer. Implementing nice UI on top of this, however, you still needs to write view/UI logic.

Motivation for this package is to reduce boilerplate works required to make an table-like UI. This is achieved by utilizing following 2 packages:

• magit-popup : for magit-like popup UI
• tablist : for dired like UI

The user of this package can focus on writing the logic of table entity creation/interaction.

In this document, the UI defined via this package is referred as tblui.

How to use

Here's a very simple example:

(require 'tblui)

(defun test-tblui-entries ()
  "Entry provider a list of lists, car is index, cdr is a vector of columns."
  (list
   (list 0 ["in progress" "https://example.com/" "1970-01-01T00:00:00Z" "push" "Test/Build"])
   (list 1 ["in progress" "https://example.com/" "1970-01-01T00:00:00Z" "push" "Test/Build"])
   (list 3 ["in progress" "https://example.com/" "1970-01-01T00:00:00Z" "push" "Test/Build"])))

(tblui-define test-tblui test-tblui-entries
 [("Status" 10 nil) ("Link" 25 nil) ("Started At" 12 nil) ("Event" 8 nil) ("Workflow" 10 nil)])

I believe giving actual example would be the most descriptory. Below is the snippet from https://github.com/Yuki-Inoue/aws.el

This covers popup ui / key binding:

(tblui-define
 aws-instances
 aws-instances-get-tabulated-list-entries
 [("Repository" 10 nil)
  ("InstType" 10 nil)
  ("Name" 30 nil)
  ("Status" 10 nil)
  ("IP" 15 nil)
  ("Settings" 20 nil)]
 ((:key "I"
   :name aws-instances-inspect-popup
   :funcs ((?I "Inspect" aws-instances-inspect-instances)))

  (:key "S"
   :name aws-instances-state-popup
   :funcs ((?O "Stop" aws-instances-stop-instances)
           (?R "Reboot" aws-instances-reboot-instances)
           (?T "Terminate" aws-instances-terminate-instances)
           (?S "Start" aws-instances-start-instances)))

  (:key "A"
   :name aws-instances-action-popup
   :funcs ((?R "Rename Instance" aws-instances-rename-instance)))

  (:key "C"
   :name aws-instances-configure-popup
   :funcs ((?C "Append ssh configs to ~/.ssh/config" aws-instances-configure-ssh-config)))

  (:key "B"
   :name aws-instances-backup-popup
   :funcs ((?I "Inspect" aws-instances-inspect-backup-instances)
           (?B "Backup" aws-instances-backup-instances)))
  ))

The macro defines all the functions/keybinds/popups required for the UI, and the UI can be visited by calling aws-instances-goto-ui function in this example.

The synopsis of this macro is shown below:

(tblui-define TBLUI-NAME ENTRIES-PROVIDER TABLE-LAYOUT POPUP-DEFINITIONS)

where

• TBLUI-NAME : the symbol name of defining tblui. It will be used as prefix for functions defined via this macro.
• ENTRIES-PROVIDER : the function which provides tabulated-list-entries
• TABLE-LAYOUT : the tabulated-list-format to be used for the tblui.
• POPUP-DEFINITIONS : list of popup definition. A popup definition is an plist of (:key KEY :name NAME :funcs FUNCTIONS). KEY is the key to be bound for the defined magit-popup. NAME is the name for defined magit-popup. FUNCTIONS is the list of action definition. Action definition is a list of 3 elements, which is (ACTIONKEY DESCRIPTION FUNCTION). ACTIONKEY is the key to be used as action key in the magit-popup. DESCRIPTION is the description of the action. FUNCTION is the logic to be called for this UI. It is the elisp function which receives the IDs of tabulated-list entry, and do what ever operation.

With this macro TBLUI-NAME-goto-ui function is defined. Calling this function will popup and switch to the tblui buffer.