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Discussion on: What would you add to Markdown? 🤔

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rfaulhaber profile image
Ryan Faulhaber • Edited

Less rigorous table syntax, at least in GFM. This is an idea stolen from the wonderful Org mode.

Tables in GFM have to be very strictly formatted. This is an issue I've run into on GitHub over and over again, so much so that I just use some external tool to deal with it.

In GFM, you have to write:

| heading 1 | heading 2 |
|-----------|-----------|
| foo       | baz       |
| bar       | quux      |
|           |           |

The equivalent could be written in Org as:

| heading 1 | heading 2|
|-
| foo | baz |
| bar | quux |
| | |

This is something Markdown should just steal, honestly!

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thinkverse profile image
Kim Hallberg

Ooh yes, better tables absolutely, even though it's something that's "old" and we don't talk about often, we do still use it, it's still the best way to display data without using something like grid IMO.

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else profile image
Simon

Are you sure about this? I thought it just works, at least you don't need to make sure the columns are equal width. The header body separator will not work like this though. But yea, table syntax is kind of weird, I agree.