Support rendering tables in markdown / documentation

[bennetbo]

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Describe the bug / provide steps to reproduce it

While looking at some rust documentation I noticed that Zed seems to lack support for rendering tables in markdown comments.

It looks like |,- and line break characters are ignored, the remaining text is displayed in a single line. The screenshot shows a table which is used in the documentation of the std::mem::size_of function in rust std.

The actual table looks like this:

/// The following table gives the size for primitives.
///
/// Type | `size_of::<Type>()`
/// ---- | ---------------
/// () | 0
/// bool | 1
/// u8 | 1
/// u16 | 2
/// u32 | 4
/// u64 | 8
/// u128 | 16
/// i8 | 1
/// i16 | 2
/// i32 | 4
/// i64 | 8
/// i128 | 16
/// f32 | 4
/// f64 | 8
/// char | 4

Looks like it is not supported in Zed 118.1 and Zed Preview 0.119.16. Would be a nice feature to render tables correctly, or just show the tables as is without cutting off characters.

Environment

Zed: v0.118.1 (Zed) OS: macOS 14.2.1 Memory: 16 GiB Architecture: aarch64

If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help explain present your vision of the feature

No response

If applicable, attach your ~/Library/Logs/Zed/Zed.log file to this issue.

If you only need the most recent lines, you can run the zed: open log command palette action to see the last 1000.

No response

[bennetbo]

Edit: Im not sure if the example above is valid "extended" markdown syntax.

But something like this doesn't work either:

VSCode seems to handle both cases I showcased. E.g.:

Syntax: https://www.markdownguide.org/extended-syntax/

[bennetbo]

Here are my observations looking at the markdown code.

Markdown is parsed into a gpui InteractiveText element, which is then rendered by RichText. In order to support rendering tables, task lists, ... we would probably need to introduce a container element which can render different blocks of tables, rich text, images, ... So table support seems to actually go hand in hand with displaying images inside a chat message.

pulldown_cmark supports parsing tables with Parser::new_ext(..., Options::ENABLE_TABLES), which is already done is zed, but the responding tags just get ignored. So that's why the |, - characters are not displayed in the popup as seen on my screenshot above.

[CurbaiCode]

I think this could be part of #5313.

[github-actions[bot]]

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[JosephTLyons]

Still valid in:

Zed: v0.156.0 (Zed Nightly 6167688a63eed63791814e39b3b8fd1a10da0e9b)
OS: macOS 14.4.0
Memory: 64 GiB
Architecture: aarch64