align columns

[jcubic]

I've tested first example and it give this output:

PID TTY TIME CMD
60881 ttys000 0:00.19 -bash
61674 ttys000 0:00.17 vim README.md

I think it would be more usefull if the output would be

PID   TTY     TIME    CMD
60881 ttys000 0:00.19 -bash
61674 ttys000 0:00.17 vim README.md

it should count the length of each cell and head and pad right to the longest using spaces.

[davepacheco]

Thanks. I'm assuming you saw this:
https://github.com/joyent/node-tab#controlling-field-width-and-alignment

Early feedback was that it was useful to be able to use cut and similar tools with specific column widths, so we opted with that approach for many of the tools that use this library. We could add an 'auto' column width to do what you suggest. That would have the downside that it couldn't be streaming: it would need to see all of the output rows before emitting even the header. That might be appropriate for some situations.

In terms of workaround: as a user, you can get similar behavior using column -t (though it is not quite the same, since column doesn't know which cells are supposed to have whitespace in them).

[jcubic]

{width: 'auto'} would be great for use case when user want to display nice looking table. I was thinking on using this in browser (it will be challenging because you don't have stdout), and don't care about streaming, because you display whole table at once.