Do you mind telling me how you use kanban? I tried kanban.el but couldnt get it to update and populate the table, is there any way that emacs can auto-update live the kanban board based on todo states of items?? (e.g. if you hit shift + right for todo it is automatically seen in the todo column, without having to revert the file?)
After a lot of though, I had a little epiphany. Vanilla org-mode is great as a kanban as long as you don't try to visualize it as a table. One should use an outline instead. org-mode is an extension of outline-mode, so this should not be surprising.
Then everything is simple. Create custom states (I have TODO, PROG, WAIT & DONE). Agenda commands show you summarized views of the kanban. You can customize stuff with a bit of elisp, but org-mode as it is works great.
Note the outline version of a kanban is still 2D, as a table, but strictly more powerful (as you can nest tasks, add text) which would be next to impossible in a table.
