Align Markdown Tables in Vim

GitHub-Flavored Markdown supports formatting data as a table:

| Step                | Users  | Conversion | Obstacles            |
| ---                 | ---    | ---        | ---                  |
| Viewed Home Page    | 13,129 | 7.9%       | Messaging            |
| Viewed Sign Up Page | 1,044  | 20.6%      | Cost, credit card    |
| Signed Up           | 215    | 31.2%      | Credit card required |
| Entered Credit Card | 67     | 50.7%      | HTML, deployment     |
| Received Submission | 34     |            |                      |

Over time, as you edit this data in Vim, keeping the Markdown table aligned could be painful, but doesn’t have to be.

Install vim-easy-align with a plugin manager such as vim-plug.

Plug 'junegunn/vim-easy-align'

Set a mapping:

" ~/.vim/ftdetect/markdown.vim
" Align GitHub-Flavored Markdown tables
vmap <Leader><Bslash> :EasyAlign*<Bar><Enter>

The <Bslash> key is the | key, a mnemonic for the table’s |s. Here’s how it looks: