badness-format(1)

okay so bestie, welcome to the <pink>badness-format</pink> glow-up page from the General Commands Manual 🌸✨ this is the one that formats LaTeX source, and we’re gonna go through every flag like it’s a group-chat receipts drop. no skips, no cap 💅

💖 NAME 💖

badness-format — format LaTeX source. iconic behavior, honestly 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

badness format [--check] [--stdin-filepath] [--line-width]
[--indent-width] [--item-indent] [--wrap] [--math-wrap] [--line-ending]
[--exclude] [--force-exclude] [-h|--help] [-V|--version] [PATHS]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Format LaTeX source. That’s the whole job, and it eats.

With paths, it formats each file in place — like, right there on disk, bestie 💖 Reads stdin (to stdout) when given -, or when paths are omitted and stdin is not a terminal. So - is literally your stdin pass-through moment, periodt.

💅 OPTIONS 💅

• --check — report which files would change without writing them. Exits non-zero if any file is not already formatted. Requires path arguments: there is no file on disk to report on when reading stdin. Lowkey the “look, don’t touch” vibe check 🔥
• --stdin-filepath <PATH> — name the stdin buffer so its language is dispatched by extension (.bib → BibTeX, anything else → LaTeX). No file is read or written; only the extension is used. Ignored when paths are given. So it’s literally just for the extension, bestie 🫶
• --line-width <LINE_WIDTH> — maximum line width before the formatter breaks a line; 0 disables width-based wrapping. That 0 is the no-wrap button, iykyk ✨
• --indent-width <INDENT_WIDTH> — number of spaces per indent step. Cute little staircase behavior 🎀
• --item-indent <ITEM_INDENT> — how to indent continuation lines in list items. Possible values:
  • hang — align continuations under the body following a bare \item (default)
  • indent — indent continuations by one indent-width step
  • none — align continuations with the \item command
• --wrap <WRAP> — how to lay out line breaks inside a paragraph. Possible values:
  • reflow — greedy fill: wrap words to the line width (default)
  • stable — preserve acceptable authored breaks and rebalance only nearby text (revision-stable wrapping)
  • sentence — one sentence per line (line width ignored)
  • semantic — semantic line breaks (sembr.org): keep authored breaks, add sentence breaks, and wrap overlong lines to the line width
  • preserve — leave authored line breaks untouched
• --math-wrap <MATH_WRAP> — how to lay out line breaks inside display math. Possible values:
  • auto — derive from the effective wrap mode: preserve → preserve, else break (default)
  • preserve — keep authored line breaks inside display-math bodies
  • single-line — never insert breaks; a long body overflows the line width
  • break — break a too-long body before its top-level operators (amsmath style)
• --line-ending <LINE_ENDING> — how to spell the line breaks in the formatted output. Possible values:
  • auto — keep the endings the file was written with (default)
  • lf — always LF (\n)
  • crlf — always CRLF (\r\n)
  • native — the platform’s convention: CRLF on Windows, LF elsewhere
• --exclude <PATTERN> — gitignore-style pattern to skip during directory discovery (repeatable). Added on top of any exclude/extend-exclude from badness.toml. Repeatable means you can stack them, bestie 🍓
• --force-exclude — apply exclude patterns to files named explicitly on the command line too (they are normally always processed). For runners like pre-commit that pass staged files as arguments. This is the “yes, even those files” button 💀
• -h, --help — print help (see a summary with -h). Iconic, obviously.
• -V, --version — print version.
• [PATHS] — files or directories to format. Pass - for stdin, which is also read when paths are omitted and stdin is not a terminal. The - is literally the stdin main character 🌈

👑 VERSION 👑

v0.28.0 — periodt.

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

badness(1), badness-lint(1), badness-parse(1), badness-lsp(1), badness-inverse-search(1), badness-init(1), badness-debug(1) — go read the whole friend group, bestie 💜

that’s the page, mwah 💋 — source/version format 0.28.0, and the footer date stamp is badness-format(1) 🫶✨