Live Preview: Support editing a table cell by cell

As of Obsidian 0.14.1, Obsidian supports tables rendering in Live Preview. Editing the table transforms the whole table to its source markdown format.

It would be nice to have a WYSWYG editor that works on a cell by cell basis.

Plugins that currently facilitate table input:

  • Advanced Tables
  • Markdown-table-editor
  • Table generator
54 Likes

I am looking at the Markdown-table editor plugin, but it does not see links from the vault for example. But is close to editing cell by cell.

7 Likes

+1 for this. I too would appreciate a Live Preview table editor, I personally dislike how source mode table editing goes off screen for large/long tables, which forces me to use horizontal scrolling.

8 Likes

+1 for this as well. I usually put long paragraphs and even images inside tables, and both the previous and current table functionality make it difficult and wonky to work with (i.e., have to do horizontal scrolling as @Ruq said when the rows are long, and sometimes the tables don’t render at all in live preview when working with images).

I’d imagine a built-in WYSIWYG table editor (perhaps similar to the one that Panda (Bear alpha) has) would make this process much smoother.

7 Likes

Please also consider adding complex table features like merge cells (cell spans over columns and rows), nested blocks in a cell (nested lists, multiple paragraphs, etc.) Below is an example of complex tables:

Complex tables can be achieved using html code, and a WYSIWYG table editor will make this task much easier.

Reference: Live Preview: Add Support for HTML tables (Render Tables as per “reading” view)

9 Likes

This would make so many things so much easier. Tables are very difficult to use at this point (even with the above mentioned plugins), so it hinders my full-adoption-plan for Obsidian.

5 Likes

Yes, I’d love if Obsidian handled tables the same way as the Milkdown editor does. WYSIWYG tables and horizontally scrolling code blocks are the only two things I’m still missing in the new Live editor.

10 Likes

Editing is so easy and smooth in that editor ! It’s bases on ProseMirror project apparently

2 Likes

It would be nice if this feature (or some other table enhancement) was on the roadmap.
It seems to be such essential feature. For me especially handling tables with multi-line cells would be useful.

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For reference, see also how Typora implemented their live-preview table editing: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tm9WALReNd00wd7ECRgLTkT2AITSakkI/view?usp=sharing

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Obsidian is now 1.0.
No updates on this?

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Use case or problem

I want to be able to edit tables in WYSIWYG mode, kind of like in google docs, without having to deal with markdown table formatting, which is very inconvenient.

Proposed solution

It would be great if the WYSIWYG mode worked for the tables. Or maybe it could be a plugin, a separate mode for viewing obsidian docs. Which allows you to edit them as tables - add rows and columns, conveniently type into cells. If the plugins like kanban are possible, then this ought to be possible too.

5 Likes

Numbered Lists in a table cell are difficult: it requires using clunky html tags. This would be my vote for the first feature to implement for table formatting.

1 Like

I hope this gets some love soon.

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Look at how mark text does it (: https://imgur.com/a/CaFvIZK
GitHub - marktext/marktext: đź“ťA simple and elegant markdown editor, available for Linux, macOS and Windows.

2 Likes

Just to make sure in the first place. Fundamentally, the markdown table still not supports having multiple rows of text in one cell, right?

For multiple rows in of text in one cell, I use GitHub - aidenlx/table-extended: Extend basic table in Obsidian with MultiMarkdown table syntax

thank you.

I just tried that plug-in. It works in the read mode. However, it seems that it does not support the preview mode.

But thank you all the same.

1 Like

not sure if the following should be new topic, I’m just sharing ideas related to GUI table editors.
This website has the ability to sort and import and export tables of different types maybe some if this functionality can be added to obsidian.

1 Like

Thanks for the suggestion (: even though a lot of use can work there way around text based formatting - i think that there is good use in having a classic GUI altrerntive/option for making and editing tables.