List Table Editor

A Visual Studio Code extension for editing list-table directives used in Sphinx and MyST Markdown documentation.

Why

Sphinx supports two kinds of tables: grid tables and list tables. Grid tables are difficult to edit, often require specialized editors such as Emacs and tend to produce heavy merge conflicts in a docs-as-code workflow. List tables are easier to maintain in version control but they are cumbersome to write by hand.

List Table Editor removes this friction by providing a small helper for creating and editing list tables directly from VS Code.

Features

• Insert a ready-to-fill list-table directive at the cursor.
• Open an interactive editor for an existing list table. The extension shows the table in a grid (powered by Tabulator) and saves the result back as a list-table.
• Works with Markdown/MyST files compiled by Sphinx.
• Built for teams using the docs-as-code approach where clean diffs and conflict-free tables matter.

Installation

1. Download the latest .vsix from GitHub Releases and install it with code --install-extension <file>.vsix.
2. Alternatively, clone this repository and run npm run package to build the extension from source, then install the generated .vsix with code --install-extension <file>.vsix.

Usage

• Insert List Table: Adds a skeleton :::{list-table} block with minimal parameters.
• Open List Table Editor: Opens the interactive table editor for the table under the cursor.

Example list-table

:::{list-table}
:header-rows: 1
:stub-columns: 0

* - Header 1
  - Header 2

* - Cell 1
  - Cell 2

:::