package ocamlformat

OCamlFormat

OCamlFormat is a tool to format OCaml code.

OCamlFormat works by parsing source code using the OCaml compiler's standard parser, deciding where to place comments in the parse tree, and writing the parse tree and comments in a consistent style.

See the source code of OCamlFormat itself and Infer for examples of the styles of code it produces.

Table of Contents

• Features

  • Overview
  • Code style
  • Options
  • Preset profiles
  • Diff
• Installation

• Editor setup

  • Emacs setup
  • Vim setup
• Documentation
• Reason
• Community
• License

Features

Overview

OCamlFormat requires source code that meets the following conditions:

• Does not trigger warning 50 (“Unexpected documentation comment.”). For code that triggers warning 50, it is unlikely that ocamlformat will happen to preserve the documentation string attachment.
• Parses without any preprocessing, using the version of the standard ocaml (not camlp4) parser used to build ocamlformat. Attributes and extension points should be correctly preserved, but other mechanisms such as camlp4, cppo, etc. will not work.
• Is either a module implementation (.ml), an interface (.mli) or a sequence of toplevel phrases (.mlt). dune files in ocaml syntax also work.

Under those conditions, ocamlformat is expected to produce output equivalent to the input. As a safety check in case of bugs, prior to terminating or modifying any input file, ocamlformat enforces the following checks:

• The parse trees obtained by parsing the original and formatted files are equal up to some minor normalization (see Normalize.equal_impl or equal_intf).
• The documentation strings, and their attachment, has been preserved (implicit in the parse tree check).
• The set of comments in the original and formatted files is the same up to their location.

Code style

There is currently no single dominant style for OCaml code, and the code produced by OCamlFormat does not attempt to closely mimic any of the common styles. Instead of familiarity, the focus is on legibility, keeping the common cases reasonably compact while attempting to avoid confusing formatting in corner cases. Improvement is inevitably possible.

There are many ways to format code that are correct in the sense that they parse to equivalent abstract syntax. Which choices OCamlFormat makes are not precisely specified, but some general guidelines that have directed the design are:

• Legibility, in the sense of making it as hard as possible for quick visual parsing to give the wrong interpretation, is of highest priority.
• Whenever possible, the high-level structure of the code should be obvious by looking only at the left margin, in particular, it should not be necessary to visually jump from left to right hunting for critical keywords/tokens/etc.
• All else equal, compact code is preferable, so indentation/white space is not added unless it helps legibility.
• Special attention has been given to making some standard syntactic gotchas visually obvious.
• When reformatting code, comments should not move around too much, but some movement seems to be unavoidable.

There is a huge space for subjective and personal preferences here, and it would be valuable to explore alternatives by adding configuration options to see which styles projects gravitate to over time. It would be even more interesting to see proposals for changes to the output which are objectively better, as opposed to subjectively different.

A limitation originates from the treatment of comments by the OCaml parser: they are not included in the parse tree itself, but are only available as a separate list. This means that OCamlFormat must decide where to place the comments within the parse tree. It does this based on source locations of code and comments, as well as using a few heuristics such as whether only white space separates a comment and some code.

Options

The full options' documentation is available in [ocamlformat-help.txt] and through ocamlformat --help. Options can be modified by the means of:

• an .ocamlformat configuration file with an option = VAL line
• using the OCAMLFORMAT environment variable: OCAMLFORMAT=option=VAL,...,option=VAL
• an optional parameter on the command line
• a global [@@@ocamlformat "option=VAL"] attribute in the processed file
• an [@@ocamlformat "option=VAL"] attribute on an expression in the processed file

.ocamlformat files in the containing and all ancestor directories for each input file are used, as well as the global .ocamlformat file defined in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ocamlformat. The global .ocamlformat file has the lowest priority, then the closer the directory is to the processed file, the higher the priority.

When the option --disable-outside-detected-project is set, .ocamlformat files outside of the project (including the one in XDG_CONFIG_HOME) are not read. The project root of an input file is taken to be the nearest ancestor directory that contains a .git or .hg or dune-project file. If no config file is found, formatting is disabled.

An .ocamlformat-ignore file specifies files that OCamlFormat should ignore. Each line in an .ocamlformat-ignore file specifies a filename relative to the directory containing the .ocamlformat-ignore file. Lines starting with # are ignored and can be used as comments.

Preset profiles

Preset profiles set all options, overriding lower priority configuration. A preset profile can be set using the --profile (or -p) option. You can pass the option --profile=<name> on the command line or add profile = <name> in an .ocamlformat configuration file.

The available profiles are:

• default sets each option to its default value
• compact sets options for a generally compact code style
• sparse sets options for a generally sparse code style
• janestreet is the profile used at JaneStreet

Diff

ocamlformat-diff uses OCamlFormat to apply the same formatting to compared OCaml files, so that the formatting differences between the two files are not displayed. It can easily be used with git diff.

Installation

OCamlFormat can be installed with opam:

opam install ocamlformat

Alternately, see ocamlformat.opam for manual build instructions.

Editor setup

Disable outside project

As mentioned in the Options section, when the option --disable-outside-detected-project is set, .ocamlformat files outside of the project (including the one in XDG_CONFIG_HOME) are not read. The project root of an input file is taken to be the nearest ancestor directory that contains a .git or .hg or dune-project file. If no config file is found, then the formatting is disabled.

This feature is often the behavior you can expect from OCamlFormat when it is directly run from your text editor, so it is advised to use this option.

Emacs setup

• add $(opam config var share)/emacs/site-lisp to load-path (as done by opam user-setup install)
• add (require 'ocamlformat) to .emacs
• optionally add the following to .emacs to bind C-M-<tab> to the ocamlformat command and install a hook to run ocamlformat when saving:

(add-hook 'tuareg-mode-hook (lambda ()
  (define-key tuareg-mode-map (kbd "C-M-<tab>") #'ocamlformat)
  (add-hook 'before-save-hook #'ocamlformat-before-save)))

To pass the option --disable-outside-detected-project (or --disable) to OCamlFormat:

• run emacs
• run M-x customize-group⏎ then enter ocamlformat⏎
• select the Ocamlformat Enable item
• select the OCamlformat mode in the Value Menu: Enable (by default), Disable or Disable outside detected project
• save the buffer (C-x C-s) then enter yes⏎ and exit

Other OCamlFormat options can be set in .ocamlformat configuration files.

Vim setup

• be sure the ocamlformat binary can be found in PATH
• install the Neoformat plugin

To change the options passed to OCamlFormat (to use the option --disable-outside-detected-project for example), you can customize NeoFormat with:

let g:neoformat_ocaml_ocamlformat = {
            \ 'exe': 'ocamlformat',
            \ 'args': ['--disable-outside-detected-project']
            \ }

let g:neoformat_enabled_ocaml = ['ocamlformat']

Documentation

OCamlFormat is documented in its man page and through its internal help:

• ocamlformat --help
• man ocamlformat

You can also view it online.

Reason

OCamlFormat is influenced by and follows the same basic design as refmt for Reason, but outputs OCaml instead of Reason.

Support for converting Reason to OCaml is included in the ocamlformat_reason package, which works by using refmt to parse Reason into an OCaml parse tree. The Reason converter can be installed using opam:

opam pin add ocamlformat_reason https://github.com/ocaml-ppx/ocamlformat.git

Community

• forum: https://discuss.ocaml.org/tags/ocamlformat
• github: https://github.com/ocaml-ppx/ocamlformat
• issues: https://github.com/ocaml-ppx/ocamlformat/issues
• developers mailing list: http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/ocamlformat-dev

See CONTRIBUTING for how to help out.

License

OCamlFormat is MIT-licensed.