How can I autoformat/indent C code in vim?

Question

When I copy code from another file, the formatting is messed up, like this:

fun()
{
for(...)
{
for(...)
{
if(...)
{
}
}
}
}

How can I autof

Answer 1

Maybe you can try the followings $indent -kr -i8 *.c

Hope it's useful for you!

Answer 2

I wanted to add, that in order to prevent it from being messed up in the first place you can type :set paste before pasting. After pasting, you can type :set nopaste for things like js-beautify and indenting to work again.

Answer 3

The builtin command for properly indenting the code has already been mentioned (gg=G). If you want to beautify the code, you'll need to use an external application like indent. Since % denotes the current file in ex mode, you can use it like this:

:!indent %

Answer 4

The plugin vim-autoformat lets you format your buffer (or buffer selections) with a single command: https://github.com/Chiel92/vim-autoformat. It uses external format programs for that, with a fallback to vim's indentation functionality.

Answer 5

I find that clang-format works well.

There are some example keybindings in the clang documentation

I prefer to use the equalprg binding in vim. This allows you to invoke clang-format with G=gg or other = indent options.

Just put the following in your .vimrc file:

autocmd FileType c,cpp setlocal equalprg=clang-format

Answer 6

I like indent as mentioned above, but most often I want to format only a small section of the file that I'm working on. Since indent can take code from stdin, its really simple:

1. Select the block of code you want to format with V or the like.
2. Format by typing :!indent.

astyle takes stdin too, so you can use the same trick there.