Tangential to your request:

On Thu, Mar 30, 2023 at 10:23 AM Jonas Bernoulli <jonas@bernoul.li> wrote:

> - For example, I think it would be nice if the columns displayed by
>   `list-packages' were customizable.  A user might want to increase the
>   width of the "Version" column, so that not every GNU-devel ELPA version
>   is truncated, or they might want to add an "Author" column.  We could
>   even allow third-party packages to add columns such as "Downloads" or
>   "Stars".
>

FWIW, I've been using these for a while now:

(add-to-list 'package-archives '("NGD" . "
> https://elpa.nongnu.org/nongnu-devel/"))
> (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/"))
> (add-to-list 'package-archives '("EGD" . "https://elpa.gnu.org/devel/"))
>
(custom-set-variables

 '(package-name-column-width 22)
>  '(package-archive-column-width 2)
>  '(package-status-column-width 2)
>  '(package-version-column-width 2))


The result isn't perfect, but it lets me see the parts I care about in an
~80 column window with 5 different archives. The main motivation I had was
that the names of _many_ packages were non-uniquely truncated by default.
This would be hard to pull off without severely truncating the version
column.

Hope that helps,
~Chad