Editor Setup

Badness ships a language server. Start it with:

badness lsp

The server speaks the Language Server Protocol over stdio. Point your editor’s LSP client at the badness binary with the lsp argument and associate it with LaTeX (.tex) and BibTeX (.bib) files.

Formatter width settings can be supplied as initializationOptions at startup or through workspace/didChangeConfiguration: lineWidth and indentWidth, either as a bare object or namespaced under a badness key. They act as a fallback: a discovered badness.toml always wins outright, and absent one, your editor’s tab size (sent with each formatting request) overrides the indent width.

Neovim

With the built-in vim.lsp client (Neovim 0.11+):

vim.lsp.config.badness = {
  cmd = { "badness", "lsp" },
  filetypes = { "tex", "latex", "plaintex", "bib" },
  root_markers = { "badness.toml", ".git" },
  init_options = { lineWidth = 80, indentWidth = 2 },
}
vim.lsp.enable("badness")

The init_options block is optional; omit it to use the defaults or a badness.toml.

VS Code

Install the Badness extension from the VS Code Marketplace or the Open VSX extension. It bundles a platform-specific badness binary and starts the language server automatically when you open a .tex file, so no separate CLI install is required.

The extension is configured through badness.* settings. By default it uses the bundled binary (badness.executableStrategy: "bundled"); set the strategy to environment to use a badness on your PATH, or path with badness.executablePath to point at a specific binary. See the extension’s README for the full list of settings.

Other Editors

Any LSP-capable editor can drive badness: configure a server whose command is badness lsp, communicating over stdio, for LaTeX documents. Consult your editor’s LSP client documentation for the exact configuration shape.

The language server is young; the set of supported LSP requests will expand. Track progress in the Changelog.