issue_comments

Or there's this recipe on StackOverflow that does the same thing without jQuery - there's an interactive demo on that page if you click "Run code snippet": https://stackoverflow.com/a/47038108/6083

All sorts of other potential solutions in that thread too.

The jqDoubleScroll plugin is interesting: https://github.com/avianey/jqDoubleScroll/blob/master/jquery.doubleScroll.js

Here's a demo: https://6317eba21040d42c0228aab9--tiny-tarsier-c1f294.netlify.app/example.html

Wouldn't be too hard to port that to work without jQuery.

Perhaps some ways to address this.

1. Add a horizontal scrollbar at the top of the table. There are some solutions here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3934271/horizontal-scrollbar-on-top-and-bottom-of-table
2. Use a fixed table header. It would be useful when you're lost in the middle of a very big table. Pure CSS solutions seem to exist: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21168521/table-fixed-header-and-scrollable-body
3. Maybe a possibility to resize columns. Not sure about that because it would more work not to lose it after each reload.
4. A way to keep favorite views for each user. The process would be: I select the column I want or not (with existing "settings" icon of each column); then I select a "favoritize view" option somewhere; then I can recall all my favorite views from a menu. These data could be hosted on the browser.

Hi & thanks for the note @simonw! I wish I had more time to play with (and contribute to) datasette. I know you don't need me to tell you that it's super cool :-)

In #998 I implemented a horizontal scrollbar for these tables, which is a big improvement - demo here: https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plants/global-power-plants

Related: #862 - a time limit on the total time spent considering suggested facets for a table.

Meant to add that of course it would be better not to reinvent CSS (one time was already enough). But one option would be to provide a mechanism to specify a CSS class for a column (a cell, a row...) and let the user give a URL path to a CSS file on the command line.

I initially went looking for a way to hide a column completely. Today I found the setting to truncate cells, but it applies to all cells. In my case I have text columns that can have many thousands of characters. I was wondering whether the metadata JSON would be an appropriate place to indicate how columns are displayed (on a col-by-col basis). E.g., I'd like to be able to specify that only 20 chars of a given column be shown, and the font be monospace. But maybe I can do that in some other way - I barely know anything about datasette yet, sorry!

This means moving away from select *. I've been thinking this would be worthwhile anyway, since that way when you click "Edit SQL" you'll get a more useful SQL statement to start hacking away at.