I think it is more trying to show that it can handle & display extremely large datasets without crashing or lagging the browser.
I recently had a scenario where I needed to have a table that could be scrolled, and needed to be able to display up to 15k rows.
At the time I went with SlickGrid[1], but this seems like a nice alternative.
[1] https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid
In Show HN: Smart-table-scroll – Browser-based tables with 1M rowsmleibman
SlickGrid
JavaScript2010–2015
mleibman / SlickGrid
SlickGrid
A lightning fast JavaScript grid/spreadsheet
15Distinct people
17Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6.9KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A lightning fast JavaScript grid/spreadsheet
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year17 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2010-12-16 20:00:59 UTC to 2015-08-21 11:33:36 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Welcome to SlickGrid
Find documentation and examples in the wiki.
UPDATE: March 5th, 2014 - I have too many things going on in my life right now to really give SlickGrid support and development the time and attention it deserves. I am not stopping it, but I will most likely be unresponsive for some time. Sorry.
UPDATE: This repo hasn't been updated in a while. https://github.com/6pac/SlickGrid/wiki seems to be the most active fork at the moment.
SlickGrid is an advanced JavaScript grid/spreadsheet component
Some highlights:
Adaptive virtual scrolling (handle hundreds of thousands of rows with extreme responsiveness)
Extremely fast rendering speed
Supports jQuery UI Themes
Background post-rendering for richer cells
Configurable & customizable
Full keyboard navigation
Column resize/reorder/show/hide
Column autosizing & force-fit
Pluggable cell formatters & editors
Support for editing and creating new rows.
Grouping, filtering, custom aggregators, and more!
Advanced detached & multi-field editors with undo/redo support.
“GlobalEditorLock” to manage concurrent edits in cases where multiple Views on a page can edit the same data.
Support for millions of rows
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
17 sourcesAsk HN: How do you familiarize yourself with a new codebase?
My question is pretty straightforward: how do you, hacker news enthusiast, familiarize yourself with a new codebase? Obviously your answer is going to be contingent on the kind of work that you do.
Some background: What's motivating me to ask is that I am flirting with the idea of trying to add a couple of features to SlickGrid (https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid), Michael Leibman's phenomenal javascript grid widget. Unfortunately Leibman got busy and isn't actively supporting it anymore.
The codebase is something like 8k lines of javascript, so it's not ludicrously big, but I'm kind of intimidated thinking about trying to make sense of it. My first strategy is just to open up important-looking javascript files (slick.core.js, slick.grid.js) and read through for comprehension. This seems like a pretty slow way to build a mental model o
Read the rest
f the code, though. Some features I want to implement are 1. an ajax data source that doesn't require paging, and 2. frozen columns. Someone else has implemented a buggy version of frozen columns (and since abandoned the project), and I might like to use it, but I can't tell if it's buggy because it's a hard problem, or because their implementation strategy was poor (or both!). So at the moment I can't evaluate if I should implement my own, or try to fix the issues with theirs.
Picking up other people's code seems to be one of the harder tasks developers face, as evidenced by how much code gets abandoned, so I wondered if the voices of experience on here could point me in the right direction, either by talking about this problem in particular, or more generally, how you build knowledge about a new codebase.
Thanks!
You might also be interested in https://github.com/quantopian/qgrid, which renders pandas DataFrames interactively with SlickGrid (https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid)
In IPython 3.0 releasedA lightning fast JavaScript Grid component
2 points · Open discussionI've been a fan of SlickGrid for a while, it handles huge data sets relatively well. If you want excel-style functionality it'll still take a little work.
https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid
In A spreadsheet in fewer than 30 lines of JavaScript, no library usedI'm not the parent, but we switched from Datatables to SlickGrid: https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid
Much nicer API and it's fast for large amounts of data. Unfortunately like many things it's lacking a lot of docs so you have to dig through the source of the examples.
In DataTables – Table plug-in for jQueryI'm using SlickGrid[1] in an internal tool. It uses divs and spans to display data, so there are certainly nice examples that do so.
1. https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid
In Blink tag removed from FirefoxAnother great grid with these properties and more is the MIT licensed Slickgrid[1] with many example grids[2]
[1]https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid/
[2]https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid/wiki/Examples
In Show HN: A souped-up HTML-based tableYou may also want to take a look at SlickGrid https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid
It is a datagrid developed using pure javascript and jquery.
The codebase is one of the best that I have seen in my life so far. Proper use of separation of concerns, responsibilities. Very neat use of oops, methods.
There are lot of examples which will teach you great stuff.
In Ask HN: Learning to write good JavaScriptSlickGrid is somewhat similar: https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid/wiki/Examples
In Handsontable - Excel-like table editor in HTML & jQueryAwesome javascript based data grid (handles 500K+ rows)
4 points · Open discussionThe most recent parallel coordinates examples are here:
http://exposedata.com/parallel/
http://bl.ocks.org/2420080 - iPad and FF friendly
Also check out:
http://vis.stanford.edu/projects/datavore/
https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid/wiki
http://novus.github.com/nvd3/
More promising saas:
http://polychart.com/
http://www.plot.io/
In Ask HN: OLAP and Reporting that feels like 2012> If you can push all your data to the front-end all at once, yes. DataTables makes this pretty straightforward.
Paginagtion(ajax or page reload takes care of it). I use slickgrid https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid; pagination is straight forward, filtering takes some work. But do the hook once, and wrap the table in jquery-ui css framework's ui-widget, and you have a good looking, working table.
> but that's just a way of saying "DataTables doesn't itself solve this problem".
slickgrid is sortable, but filtering needs work. In fact, "slickgrid doesn't do everything" is part of its philosophy.
I have come to opposite conclusion that of author's. Having an excel sheet replacement in your repertoire is important, especially when you are replacing enterprisy stuff.
In 37signals doesn’t like you sorting stuff. Are you just remaking a spreadsheet?Lightning fast JS grid handles millions of rows with ease
4 points · Open discussionDataTables (http://www.datatables.net/)
and SlickGrid (https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid)
are already amazing and feature-complete. It'll be interesting to see what the jQueryUI team can come up with now that they've decided not to use either of these (or any other for that matter). For reference, Grooveshark decided to go with SlickGrid in their re-write, and from their dev blog posts it sounds like they love it.
In Unleash The GridShowing the 15 most recent of 17 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.