egui_deferred_table 0.1.0

An egui table, where the number of rows/columns is deferred
Documentation

Build Status Discord YouTube Channel Subscribers MakerPnP GitHub Organization's stars Donate via Ko-Fi Subscribe on Patreon

egui_deferred_table

Another egui table system, for comparisons to other popular egui crates, see below.

Why? Existing crates either don't have all the features and/or do not perform well and/or have sub-optimal APIs for creating desktop-focussed productivity-style applications.

Screenshot

API

Attention is paid to defining topics of code, as below. For most UI apps there are three distinct topics, as follows.

  • Data sources - Where the data comes from, how much of it there is, etc.
  • Actions - User interactions. Selection, visibility, row/column re-sizing, hiding, etc.
  • Rendering - How to display the data, formatting, colors, etc.

Data sources

egui_deferred_table has the concept of a data-source which is used to manage data retrieval, and there are blanket implementations for various tuples. e.g. vec![("example", 42.0_f32, true)].

Actions

When a user interacts with the table, a vec of Action is returned so that your code can handle them appropriately.

Rendering

Rendering code is separated from data-source related code.

Status

This crate is work-in-progress, it aims to provide a 'batteries-included' solution that works for many different sources of table data.

Feature Status
Layout Working
Variable Row Heights Working
Variable Column Widths Working
Smooth scrolling Working
Hiding/Re-ordering Next
Column/Row re-size handles Not-started
Sorting Not-started
Filtering Not-started

Demos

See demos folder.

Demos include examples of data sources using spreadsheets, background-loaded, sparse data sources, vec! data sources.

Demos include simple and complex UIs, check out the 'docking' example which combines many of the other examples into a single demo which uses egui_dock tabs and windows for each demo.

License

Available under APACHE or MIT licenses.

Authors

  • Dominic Clifton - Project founder and primary maintainer.

Changelog

0.1.0

First release

Comparisons

Crate Notes Auto-size Selection Hiding Sorting Filtering Resizable rows Resizable columns Variable amount of columns/rows Performance with 1,000's of rows API notes
egui_deferred_table Work-in-progress No 🚧 Planned 🚧 Planned 🚧 Planned 🚧 Planned 🚧 (In-progress) 🚧 Yes (In-progress) ✅ Yes ✅ excellent Very flexible
egui_table egui_table has a "batteries not included" design ✅ (*1) ❌ No ❌ No ❌ No ❌ No ❌ No ❌ No ❌ No ✅ excellent Flexible
egui_extras::Table ✅ (*1) ❌ No ❌ No ❌ No ❌ No ❌ No ✅ No ❌ No (*2) ✅ good Rigid, unforgiving
egui_data_tables ✅ (*1) ✅ Yes ✅ No ✅ No ❗ (*3) ❌ No ✅ No ❌ No (*2) ✅ extremely poor (*4) Very rigid, hard-to-use (*5)
  1. Works only when every cell has been rendered - no-up front checking of every cell's width height. e.g. on the first frame, the rendered cells are used to calculate the column widths, but when the user scrolls down to a wider row the column width will not be correct. The only case where the column width is correct is when the first frame renders the widest cell, this leads to a bad UX.
  2. requires column to be called at runtime for each column, conditional code in the table definition required to support variable amount of columns, must be paired with equal amount of calls to header.col, usually requiring repeating the conditional logic.
  3. Only at the API level.
  4. Very slow with a data set of ~1000 rows and 13 columns, text-only data built from strings, floats or enums.
  5. The RowViewer trait in the API mixes many concerns in a 'garbage-bin' style API which attempts to do everything: presentation, copy/paste, insertion/deletion, filtering, hotkeys, events. This leads to you having to implement or work-around features that you do not need/use/want. It also mixes presentation with business-logic. e.g. your cell rendering code is defined in the same trait impl that also selection changes and data deletion. No clear separation between user interactions and rendering.
  • The author of this crate has evaluated and used all the above crates in large desktop-style productivity apps.

Timeline

2025/08/13 - Crate created!

Links

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute, please raise an issue or a PR on the github issue tracker, work-in-progress PRs are fine to let us know you're working on something, and/or visit the discord server. See the Links section above.