Getting Started

Badness’s main subcommands are format, lint, and lsp (with parse and init as helpers). This page walks through formatting and linting from the command line. For editor integration, see Editor Setup.

Formatting a File

Format a file in place:

badness format paper.tex

Pass several paths to format them all:

badness format intro.tex methods.tex results.tex

Pass - to read from standard input and write the formatted result to standard output—handy for piping or editor integrations:

cat paper.tex | badness format -

A piped standard input is also read when you pass no paths at all, so the shorter cat paper.tex | badness format works too. At an interactive prompt, though, where there is nothing to pipe, badness format with no paths reports a usage error rather than silently waiting on the terminal.

Checking Without Writing

In CI you usually want to verify that files are already formatted rather than rewrite them. The --check flag prints a diff of what would change and exits non-zero if any file is not already formatted:

badness format --check paper.tex

Diff in paper.tex:12:
 \section{Introduction}
-Some    text with   odd spacing.
+Some text with odd spacing.
1 of 1 file(s) would be reformatted

Since --check writes nothing, that report is the only account of what would change, which is why it is shown by default. Pass --quiet for just the file list and the summary—useful when a first run over an unformatted project would otherwise flood a CI log:

badness format --check --quiet .

The report goes to stdout (only errors use stderr) and is colorized when writing to a terminal; --color always|never overrides that, and NO_COLOR is honored.

Linting

lint parses each file and reports any diagnostics found, rendered with source snippets. It exits non-zero when there is at least one diagnostic:

badness lint paper.tex

Like format, it reads standard input when given - (or when piped with no paths):

cat paper.tex | badness lint -

The snippets go to stderr and are colorized when it is a terminal, under the same --color always|never and NO_COLOR rules as the --check diff. The --output concise and --output json forms are meant for other programs to read, so they stay plain whatever --color says.

Adjusting Layout

The formatter takes a few style options on the command line:

badness format --line-width 100 --indent-width 4 --wrap preserve paper.tex

See the CLI Reference for every flag and the Configuration reference for what --wrap controls.