An Eclipse plugin that integrates the clang-format tool as an alternative C/C++ code formatter and checks C++ coding style with the cpplint.py tool.
A consistent coding style is important for a project. And many projects use tools to format the code and check coding style. Many developers use Eclipse as a C/C++ IDE, but it is a little difficult to integrate an external tool to Eclipse. People have to switch to a command line and run the tools to format the code and check the coding style. And then they need to switch back to Eclipse to find the line and fix the coding style issue based on the tool's output. For the "lazy" people like me, this is irritating.
The expected behavious is that people just format the code fragment by first selecting it and then pressing Command + Shift + f on MacOS or Ctrl + Shift + f on Linux and other systems. Further more, the coding style checker is run whenever a file is saved and all the issues are marked on the editor. That is exactly what CppStyle does.
There are many C/C++ code format tools such as "astyle" but currently "clang-format" is my favorite. It has several pre-defined styles and is highly configurable.
cpplint.py is a C++ coding style checker provided by google. It can be used to check the C++ code against the Google C++ coding style. It can detect many style errors and maintain the consistency of coding style.
cpplint.py http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.html#cpplint
clang-format http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html
sudo curl -L "http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cpplint/cpplint.py" -o /usr/bin/cpplint.py
sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/cpplint.py
clanf-format can be built from llvm/clang source. But installing from binary is much easier.
For Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install clang-format-3.4
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/clang-format-3.4 /usr/bin/clang-format
On 64 bit platform, clang-format can also be downloaded from this page.
If you prefer, you can download the entire LLVM toolchain and extract the clang-format binary yourself. Just extract the .tar.xz file and copy bin/clang-format into your PATH (e.g. /usr/local/bin). - Set the path to the clang-format binaries.
Drag the above button to your running Eclipse workspace
[Go to Eclipse Marketplace page] (https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/cppstyle)
CppStyle can be installed like other eclipse plugins from this site.
http://www.cppstyle.com/mars (Eclipse Mars)
http://www.cppstyle.com/luna (Eclipse Luna)
http://www.cppstyle.com/kepler (Eclipse Kepler)
Go to Help -> Install New Software page, click Add button and then enter a name (CppStyle) and the above URL, and then click OK.
Select CppStyle from drop-down list and then check the name CppStyle listed in the page. And then click Next and OK until restart.
To configure CppStyle globally, go to Preferences -> CppStyle dialog.
To configure CppSytle for a C/C++ project, go to Project properties -> CppStyle dialog.
To enable CppStyle(clang-format) as default C/C++ code formatter, go to Preferences -> C/C++ -> Code Style -> Formatter page and switch "Code Formatter" from [built-in] to "CppStyle (clang-format)"
To enable CppStyle(clang-format) as C/C++ code formatter for a project, go to Project properties -> C/C++ General -> Formatter page and switch "Code Formatter" from [built-in] to "CppStyle (clang-format)"
CppStyle does not support appending command line parameters to clang-format and cpplint.py. So, use their respective configuration files to do this.
CppStyle will pass the full absolute path of the source file to clang-format in command line. And clang-format will try to find the configuration file named .clang-format in the source file's path, and its parent's path if not found previously, and parent's path of the parent and so on.
So put the configuration file .clang-format into the project's root direcotry can make it work for all source files in the project.
Further more, you can also add the configuration file .clang-format into Eclipse workspace root directory to make it work for all projects in the workspace.
To generate the clang-format configuration file .clang-format:
clang-format -dump-config -style=Google > .clang-format
If no configure file named .clang-format is found, "-style=Google" will be passed to clang-format and Google style will be used by default.
CppStyle will pass --root=project_root_dir and source file's full absolute path to cpplint.py in the command line. And cpplint.py also supports per-directory configuration by the configuration file named CPPLINT.cfg.
CPPLINT.cfg file can contain a number of key=value pairs.
Currently the following options are supported:
set noparent
filter=+filter1,-filter2,...
exclude_files=regex
linelength=80
To get the details of these options you can run the command:
cpplint.py --help