Draw pretty unicode tables in org-mode and orgtbl-mode.

Very experimental.

Enable the org-pretty-table-mode in an org buffer and it will replace the ASCII table borders with beautiful unicode ones. The replacement is only visual (using display text properties), nothing in your file is actually changed. The buffer and the file saved to disc still contains the original ASCII characters (which it must since that's what org uses for table detection).

You can customize org-pretty-table-charset to change the border characters. This mode comes with two built-in "themes", single horizontal lines and double horizontal lines. See M-x customize-variable RET org-pretty-table-charset RET.

This package is not yet distributed through package archives and you have to install it manually.

1. Download the org-pretty-table.el file into some folder in your hard drive (for example ~/.emacs.d/site-lisp).

2. Put the following code into your ~/.emacs.d/init.el or ~/.emacs file:

(progn
  (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/site-lisp")
  (require 'org-pretty-table)
  (add-hook 'org-mode-hook (lambda () (org-pretty-table-mode))))

3. Evaluate the progn block by putting the point on the progn and calling C-M-x (M-x eval-defun). If unsure, you can also simply restart Emacs.

4. Open an org-mode file. Calling M-: org-pretty-table-mode RET should print 1 in the minibuffer. You're done!

Use Eask to install dependencies:

eask install-deps --dev

Run tests with

eask test buttercup