The Problem

You’re writing a markdown file and you need a table. No problem, there’s a standard for tables… Except that now you have this ugly mess:

| ID | Name | Category ID |
|-|-|-|
| 11092 | Gorilla Fist | 27 |
| 11212 | Plate 3 x 3 | 14 |
| 11209 | Tyre 21 x 9.9 | 29 |
| 11640 | ELECTRIC GUITAR SHAFT Ø3.2 NO. 3 | 27 |

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a magical way to turn that table into a nicely structured one? (like at the end of this post). Well there is.

The Solution

Brian Hicks just posted about doing this in helix, a modal editor comparable to neovim in various ways. I have been using neovim for a while, though, so I wondered how to accomplish the same thing.

I assumed that there might be some plugin or at least a way to pipe the table to column, a tool I’ve used to format CSVs on the command line. The answer was found in a comment by @CalebMaclennan on lobste.rs. In short, you pipe the table to pandoc.

The solution Maclennan suggests is:

vip:!pandoc -t markdown-simple_tables

Let’s break that down for a sec:

1. vip: This character sequence
   1. Takes you into visual mode
   2. Tells neovim to select “inner”
   3. paragraph
2. The ! pipes out the paragraph to a command (everything else on that line). The other stuff happening on that line doesn’t matter too much except to say that “pipe tables” is a style of tables but, for the more interested reader:
   1. The -t switch tells pandoc the output format (short for --to)
   2. markdown is the output target
   3. With just markdown, the table will get a horizontal separator for the thead but not vertical separators. The -simple_tables modifier tells pandoc to add the | between cells.

| ID    | Name                             | Category ID |
|-------|----------------------------------|-------------|
| 11092 | Gorilla Fist                     | 27          |
| 11212 | Plate 3 x 3                      | 14          |
| 11209 | Tyre 21 x 9.9                    | 29          |
| 11640 | ELECTRIC GUITAR SHAFT Ø3.2 NO. 3 | 27          |

Tying it Together

In neovim (and vim), you can map commands to keys. In my init.lua, I added this line:

vim.keymap.set('v', '<leader>t', '!pandoc -t markdown-simple_tables<CR>',
  { silent = true, desc = 'Align selected md table using pandoc' })

Now, when I’m in visual mode (specified by ‘v’ in the function call), I can select my table (with something like vip, hit <leader> (I’ve set mine to space) and then t et voila: beautifully formatted table. You’re welcome.

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