Emacs: Working with Tables

Xah Lee, 2009-08-20, …, 2011-10-13

This page shows you how to use emacs's “table” feature. This feature will let you format tabular in ASCII drawing. Then you can interactively create and edit tables with emacs such as insert/delete column/row. You can also convert it to HTML or LaTex formats.

Note that this feature is not very robust. If your data has just few rows and columns, with simple text or numbers, then emacs table feature is very useful. But if you work with importing/exporting actual spread sheets or address books, with hundreds of rows or columns, emacs table feature does not handle it well.

Creating A Table

Creating A New Empty Table

To create a table, type 【Alt+x table-insert】.

It'll ask you these questions: {Number of columns, Number of rows, Cell width, Cell height}. You can just press Enter key to accept the default. You can change the values for each later. The result will look like this:

+-----+-----+-----+
|     |     |     |
+-----+-----+-----+
|     |     |     |
+-----+-----+-----+
|     |     |     |
+-----+-----+-----+

Press Tab or 【Shift+Tab】 to go to neighbor cells.

Creating A Table From Delimiter Separated Values

If you already have a table data, such as Comma Separated Values (CSV) from spreadsheets, or even from a existing HTML table, you can create a table from that.

Let's say you have this comma separated values:

,A,B,C
1,1a,1b,1c
2,2a,2b,2c
3,3a,3b,3c

Select the whole text, then type 【Alt+x table-capture】. It'll ask you these questions:

• Column delimiter regexp. Answer: ,.
• Row delimiter regexp. Answer newline, by typing 【Ctrl+q Ctrl+j】.
• Justify. Type one of {left,center,right}.
• Minimum cell width. This is the number of chars per cell. Type 5 for example.

Emacs will then change it to this:

+-----+-----+-----+-----+
|     |A    |B    |C    |
+-----+-----+-----+-----+
|1    |1a   |1b   |1c   |
+-----+-----+-----+-----+
|2    |2a   |2b   |2c   |
+-----+-----+-----+-----+
|3    |3a   |3b   |3c   |
+-----+-----+-----+-----+

In the minibuffer prompt, to enter a tab character (ASCII 9), type 【Ctrl+q Tab】. To enter a newline character, type 【Ctrl+q Ctrl+j】.

Note: In a emacs buffer, newlines are always represented by the Line Feed char (“\n”, LF; ASCII 10). You don't have to worry about what OS you are using. (See: Emacs: Newline Representations ^M ^J ^L)

Using Table Menu

Once you have created a table, you can use the menu to do things. The menu “Table” will appear when your cursor is on a table cell.

If you prefer using commands, you can type 【Alt+x table-】 then press Tab to see a list of all commands.

Some of the most useful are:

table-insert-row
table-insert-column
table-delete-row
table-delete-column

table-generate-source      output to HTML, LaTeX, CALS
table-release              output to space separated values

Generating Output

To generate output for your table, pull the menu 〖Table▸table-generate-source〗 or type 【Alt+x table-generate-source】. Then, you can choose one of html, latex, or cals (a XML based one).

To output to space delimited values, call “table-release”.

(info "(emacs) Text Based Tables")