Love list.js. We've used it for a couple of internal things and users have always been impressed with the searching - it kind of feels like something that should have always been built into long tabular lists.
I've been using List.js lately, submitted a few bug fixes on Github for it as well. Great plugin and an awesome lightweight alternative to DataTables. Shaved a nice ~80k of the payload of CRUD app I'm working on right now.
I still wish you exposed a DOM fragment as an option instead of HTML strings.
I might take a crack at a patch if no one else does.
With the new plugins-functionality you could create your own special sorter that uses data attributes too. Then you would call it with listObj.yourSortersName(something).
And you can still use the regular sort function which since this version is a included in the helper object :)
Actually I realized I can already do this even without plugin functionality. The Item object passed to the sorter has access to the element http://screencast.com/t/Z5uVYNtH8
Awesome! The only thing missing now is support for fuzzy search
With plugins you can build your own fuzzy search! :)
...but I know that is a feature many want, so maybe I will build a plugin if no one get before me.