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mleibman/slickgrid

★ 6,947JavaScriptAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5Setup · moderate

TLDR

A JavaScript data grid library that displays millions of rows in a web page at full browser speed by only rendering the rows visible on screen, like a fast, customizable spreadsheet for web apps.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((SlickGrid))
    What It Does
      Virtual scrolling grid
      Large dataset display
    Features
      Column resize and reorder
      Cell editing with undo
      Row grouping
      Filtering
    Tech
      JavaScript
      jQuery UI themes
    Status
      Original unmaintained
      Community fork active
    Audience
      Web app developers
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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Display a spreadsheet with hundreds of thousands of rows in a web app without slowing down the browser.

USE CASE 2

Build an editable data table with column resizing, reordering, and keyboard navigation for an internal admin tool.

USE CASE 3

Group and filter large datasets visually in the browser without sending data back to a server.

USE CASE 4

Add custom cell renderers to show charts, images, or interactive controls inside grid cells.

Tech stack

JavaScriptjQuery UI

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

The original repository is unmaintained since 2014, the README recommends using the active community fork for new projects.

License terms are not described in the explanation.

In plain English

SlickGrid is a JavaScript component that displays large amounts of data in a scrollable grid, similar to a spreadsheet, inside a web page. Its main design goal is speed: it uses virtual scrolling, meaning it only renders the rows actually visible on screen at any moment rather than drawing hundreds of thousands of rows into the page all at once. This allows it to handle very large datasets without slowing down the browser. Features include column resizing, reordering, showing and hiding columns, full keyboard navigation, and cell editing with undo and redo support. Cells can be displayed and edited using custom code, so the grid is not limited to plain text. The component also supports grouping rows together, filtering which rows are shown, and custom summary calculations at the group level. The project is a JavaScript library intended for developers building web applications that need a high-performance data table. It works with jQuery UI themes for visual styling. Full documentation and usage examples are in the project wiki on GitHub. A note on maintenance: the original author posted in 2014 that he was unable to give the project the attention it needed. The README also points to an active community fork at a separate GitHub repository, which has continued development since then. If you are looking for an actively maintained version, the README suggests checking that fork instead.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I want to display a dataset with 500,000 rows in a web page using SlickGrid. Show me the minimal HTML and JavaScript setup to get virtual scrolling working.
Prompt 2
How do I add custom cell editors to SlickGrid so users can edit cells with a dropdown selector instead of a plain text input?
Prompt 3
I want to group SlickGrid rows by a category column and show subtotals for each group. Walk me through the grouping and aggregation setup.
Prompt 4
Show me how to add column filtering to SlickGrid so users can type into a filter row above the headers to hide non-matching rows.
Prompt 5
The original SlickGrid repo is unmaintained. Help me migrate my existing SlickGrid code to the active community fork.
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