🧱 Table Go Module — A Lightweight ANSI Table Renderer for Go

Version 0.3
https://ko-fi.com/vanthomas ❤️

A fast, dependency-free, Unicode-aware, ANSI-styled table renderer for terminal applications.
Designed for simplicity, predictable output, and fully customizable formatting.

Useful for:

• CLI apps
• Debuggers
• Monitoring dashboards
• Log/worker supervisors
• Live-updating tables (NEW in v0.3)
• Anything needing clean colored terminal tables

No external libraries. No magic. 100% Go.

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✨ Features

• Simple declarative column definitions
• Automatic flexible column sizing (Flex / Width)
• ANSI colors + effects (bold, underline, reverse, etc.)
• Per-prefix and per-suffix styling
• Unicode-safe alignment
• Number formatting with rounding
• Pure Go, zero dependencies
• User-friendly Push(...) API
• Beautiful Unicode borders
• Optional header drawing
• Stable terminal width handling

🔥 New in v0.3

• Live table redraw using ANSI cursor-up (Draw(true))
• Pointer-based cell updates (mutate cell → table updates automatically)
• Draw() = normal output, Draw(true) = redraw mode
• Flicker-free refreshing without clearing lines
• Perfect for worker dashboards, counters, animations, etc.

Example usage of the new feature:

cc := &table.Cell{Data: "986", Color: 25}

workersTable.Push("1", "45.334", "normal row")
workersTable.Push("3", cc)

for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
    cc.Data = strconv.Itoa(i)
    fmt.Println(workersTable.Draw(true))
    time.Sleep(500 * time.Millisecond)
}

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📦 Installation

go get github.com/tominkoltd/go-table

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🛠 Field Options

Each column is defined using a simple struct:

type Field struct {
    Caption         string
    Flex            int
    Width           int
    Align           string
    Color           int
    BackgroundColor int
    Effect          int

    Prefix          string
    PrefixColor     int
    PrefixEffect    int

    Suffix          string
    SuffixColor     int
    SuffixEffect    int

    IsNumber        bool
    DecimalPlaces   int
}

Supports:

• captions / headers
• flexible or fixed widths
• left / right / center alignment
• foreground + background colors
• ANSI text effects
• numeric mode with decimal rounding
• per-column prefixes and suffixes (e.g. currency)

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🎨 ANSI Effects

Bitmask flags:

• EffectBold
• EffectDim
• EffectItalic
• EffectUnderline
• EffectBlink
• EffectReverse
• EffectStrikethrough
• EffectOverline
• EffectDoubleUnderline

Combine with OR, for example:

Effect: table.EffectBold | table.EffectUnderline

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📤 API Overview

Push rows

table.Push("1", "45.33", "description")
table.Push(table.Cell{Data: "999", Color: 12})
table.Push(&table.Cell{Data: "986", Color: 25})

You can mix raw values and styled cells, including pointers for live updates.

Draw the table

output := table.Draw()      // normal render
output := table.Draw(true)  // redraw mode (moves cursor up)
fmt.Println(output)

• Draw()

  • Renders the table normally (no cursor movement).

• Draw(true)

  • Moves the cursor up by the number of lines drawn previously
  • Allows in-place redraw of the same table area

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🧩 Typical Use Cases

• Worker / process overviews
• Queue / job statistics
• Live counters and metrics
• CLI dashboards and status pages
• Anywhere you’d otherwise spam fmt.Println but want it pretty

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💬 Why Another Tablewriter?

Many existing Go table libraries are:

• heavy
• verbose
• full of .SetXxx() chains
• not Unicode-safe
• not ANSI-clean
• not designed for live redraw

This library is:

• tiny
• dependency-free
• predictable
• ANSI-focused
• built for real-world CLI apps

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💖 Support Development

If this library saves you time or looks nice in your terminal:

👉 https://ko-fi.com/vanthomas

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📝 License

MIT License