I'm not being facetious here ... but aren't XML, Json and Yaml popular tree-structured formats?
Like OP mentions Excel for instance, for editing tabular data, which isn't quite a standard file format, and in any case supports many different formats for tabular data.
I can't help but wonder if OP is focusing on "format" rather than the structure of the data itself. There's plenty of editors for these well known formats. Perhaps he just needs to restructure his problem to use one of these?
In XML for instance, it's fairly straightforward to implement a "plugin" such as he describes, using python or ruby and a DOM parser, which could amongst other things provide the different renderings described.
I remember using XML Spy a long time back which seemed to do this quite well, as an ever expanding grid of cells, click into a cell, and it would expand showing its constituent cells. There were different tree representations available as well.
Like OP mentions Excel for instance, for editing tabular data, which isn't quite a standard file format, and in any case supports many different formats for tabular data.
I can't help but wonder if OP is focusing on "format" rather than the structure of the data itself. There's plenty of editors for these well known formats. Perhaps he just needs to restructure his problem to use one of these?
In XML for instance, it's fairly straightforward to implement a "plugin" such as he describes, using python or ruby and a DOM parser, which could amongst other things provide the different renderings described.
I remember using XML Spy a long time back which seemed to do this quite well, as an ever expanding grid of cells, click into a cell, and it would expand showing its constituent cells. There were different tree representations available as well.