What's next for Tabulator (May 2026)

[rathboma]

Hi all,

Happy to announce that as of May 17 2026 Oli and I have finished the transfer of the project, and Tabulator is now being maintained by the Beekeeper Studio team. You might notice it now lives under it's own org - tabulator-tables.

Confused? Read Oli's original post, passing the torch

Who we are

Beekeeper Studio is an open source database GUI built on Electron, so you can see how we use tabulator throughout our source code. We have a commercial version that pays the bills, and that's allowing us to dedicate some time to growing Tabulator. We're totally self-funded, which allows us to do stuff like this.

We're only a small group (3 full time), but we're heavy users of Tabulator and we want it to grow and succeed.

For now the maintainers are: @rathboma, @azmy60, and @not-night-but

Current state

Tabulator is stable and valuable and used across millions of websites, but there haven't been real feature releases in a 2 years. Development is a little stagnant, testing is sparse, and issues and PRs are piling up.

Goal

For Tabulator to return to being the most trusted, well maintained, and sustainable open source table library available.

Three Month Plan

Tl;dr: Get tabulator moving forward slowly.

More specifics:

• Triage all Tabulator issues
• Get all Beekeeper Studio patches into Tabulator proper, and move Beekeeper to a mainline tabulator release
• 3 patch releases, one per month
  • First release - only bug fixes and BKS patches
  • Follow up - Small features released (eg date picker)
• Bug fixes released - as many as possible
  • We need a significant amount of new testing to avoid regressions on every change. This will take time.
• Website moved to new hosting (Oli is still hosting the website right now)
• Website search fixed (for good)
• Website download should go to a page that shows you how to install on NPM
• Get a mailing list signup process for release notifications started on the docs / github
• Figure out how to generate types properly (and take over the types mini project)
• Make support and contact channels clear

Stuff you should know

• Tabulator is dependency free, this will remain true
• We are changing as little as possible about the 'bones' of the project (license, structure, etc)
• We will begin doing monthly minor releases and more frequent bug fix releases, major releases come when the minor number gets too big or we release a breaking change.
• Three of us are planning to spend ~4 hours per week on Tabulator.
• There isn't much testing. I'd expect some releases to be a little rocky until we get better test infrastructure in place.

How you can help

• Please help us add unit and integration tests!
• If you have a bug you want fixed, please file an issue and be as detailed as possible. I'm talking absurd levels of detail :-D.
• Please join the Discord, help community members, and say hi!

[olifolkerd]

Fantastic plan guys! Really excited to see where you take things

Oli :)

[Tyoneb]

Great stuff, thank you for picking things up! It would be amazing if you were able to open source the website at some point. There are plenty of little typos and small things that could be easily improved there.

I'm very interested in the types stuff, I had created a small fork a while ago to try and make the library optionally type safe (e.g. have getData, getValue and all commands to return typed values) but it's quite an extensive project and I never completed it. I could like into it, but it depends on what your own objectives are!

[rathboma]

@Tyoneb we've been thinking about using JS doc to generate the types rather than trying to convert the code base to typescript. What do you think?

[Tyoneb]

@Tyoneb we've been thinking about using JS doc to generate the types rather than trying to convert the code base to typescript. What do you think?

It's very understandable and I tried once on a large project but in the end I rewrote everything in TypeScript... As soon as you want to use generics and some utility types, JSDoc is very much lacking features. I believe Rich Harris made it work for Svelte so maybe it's possible to use some tricks that I don't know but I believe that you still have to use .d.ts files for advanced stuff.

If it were up to me, I'd migrate to TypeScript but you probably have cost constraints that limit your choices... That being said, that could be an excellent use case to get started with an LLM.

Note that if you decide to migrate to TypeScript, I'm not sure I would recommend adding the type safety at the same time as it would add a lot of complexity.

[BaptisteCrouzet]

Hi, great news !

I would like to help on the docs too !

TypeScript is an awesome idea, but maybe after some fixes and tests ? In order to make this big change safe if a some rewriting is planned... because as you type things, you will find some contradictions in thé code.

[Jojoshua]

@rathboma I help maintain the official @types for tabulator. https://www.npmjs.com/package/@types/tabulator-tables

Obviously I think TypeScript migration would be awesome and would be a major factor in preventing regressions in large codebases. Think of it like free unit tests in some areas. LLM's are also very good with it and going forward it helps them produce better results with the type safety. You might could use the type definitions we've got so far as a way to bootstrap the idea.