Comparison with other 'table' libraries

[danieleades]

There are now a few libraries for pretty-printing tables to the console. It would be really helpful to have a bit of a comparison to allow users (including myself!) to determine which one to go for.

• tabled
• prettytable-rs (possibly unmaintained)
• cli-table
• term-table-rs
• comfy-table
• etc...

[Nukesor]

Feel free to create a MR for this :)

Especially tabled did quite a lot of fancy stuff recently!

[Nukesor]

I can already give you a short summary on what comfy-table is about:

@danieleades Maybe it would make sense to aks for something like this from each project maintainer?
I think each maintainer is best suited to give a fair assessment of their library :)

Comfy-table

One of comfy-table's big foci is on providing a minimalistic, but rock-solid library for building text-based tables.
This means that the code is very well tested, no usage of unsafe and unwrap is only used if we can be absolutely sure that it's safe.
There're only two occurrences of unsafe in all of comfy-table's dependencies, to be exact inside the tty communication code, which can be explicitly disabled.

The other focus is on dynamic-length content arrangement.
This means that a lot of work went into building an algorithm that finds a (near) optimal table layout for any given text and terminal width.

Other mentionable features are: Custom constraints for layouts, coloring/styling and table design presets.

[Nukesor]

See sibling issues:
zhiburt/tabled#139
devashishdxt/cli-table#26
RyanBluth/term-table-rs#9

[Nukesor]

@danieleades prettytables-rs is indeed unmaintained. I already tried to communicate with the author roughly ~2.5 years ago, which is why I built this library in the first place. (phsym/prettytable-rs#122)

I already went ahead and created a PR and Issue for deprecation,
phsym/prettytable-rs#139
phsym/prettytable-rs#138

as well as a PR for a rust-sec advisory-db entry:
rustsec/advisory-db#1173

[Nukesor]

@zhiburt @devashishdxt @RyanBluth
I think it would be a good idea to mention in our comparisons that prettytable-rs is indeed unmaintained, so there won't be any future confusion.

I'm not sure why the advisory-db entry isn't being merged, though. This would be the best solution in the long run.

[RyanBluth]

@Nukesor I added a comment to the term-table-rs repo, but I'll also post it here.

term-table-rs is pretty basic in terms of features. My goal with the project is to provide a good set of tools for rendering CLI tables, while also allowing users to bring their own tools for things like colours. One thing that is unique to term-table-rs(as far as I'm aware) is the ability to have different number of columns in each row of the table.

[Nukesor]

This worked out quite well in the end. I'm closing this issue :)

[wookietreiber]

It would be really nice if this could be added to the CLI book, like the useful crates chapter.

[Nukesor]

@wookietreiber Feel free to do so :) I definitely wouldn't mind!