Lisp-Format --- A tool to format lisp code.

This lisp-format script aims to provide the same functionality as clang-format only for lisp languages instead of for C languages. Emacs is used to perform formatting. The behavior of clang-format is followed as closely as possible with the goal of a direct drop in replacement in most contexts.

This script is suitable for (re)formatting lisp code using an external process. This script may be marked as executable and executed directly on the command line as follows.

chmod +x lisp-format
./lisp-format -h

This script is appropriate for use in git commit hooks, see Running lisp-format git hooks.

Customizing lisp-format

Clang-format allows for customized "styles" to be specified by writing .clang-format files in the base of code repository and passing the -style=file flag to clang-format. Lisp-format supports the same using .lisp-format files. These files may hold arbitrary emacs-lisp code, and they will be loaded before every run of lisp-format. The following example file will (1) load slime assuming you have slime installed via quicklisp, (2) adjust the syntax-table for special reader macro characters, and (3) specify indentation for non-standard functions (e.g., from the popular common lisp Alexandria package).

;;;; -*- emacs-lisp -*-
(set-default 'indent-tabs-mode nil)
(mapc (lambda (dir) (add-to-list 'load-path dir))
      (directory-files
       (concat (getenv "QUICK_LISP")
               "/dists/quicklisp/software/") t "slime-v*"))
(require 'slime)

;;; Syntax table extension for curry-compose-reader-macros
(modify-syntax-entry ?\[ "(]" lisp-mode-syntax-table)
(modify-syntax-entry ?\] ")[" lisp-mode-syntax-table)
(modify-syntax-entry ?\{ "(}" lisp-mode-syntax-table)
(modify-syntax-entry ?\} "){" lisp-mode-syntax-table)
(modify-syntax-entry ?\« "(»" lisp-mode-syntax-table)
(modify-syntax-entry ?\» ")«" lisp-mode-syntax-table)

;;; Specify indentation levels for specific functions.
(mapc (lambda (pair) (put (first pair) 'lisp-indent-function (second pair)))
      '((if-let 1)
        (if-let* 1)))

As described in the "git lisp-format -h" output, you can use "git config" to change the default style to "file" with the following command (run in a git repository).

git config lispFormat.style "file"

Running the above and adding a .lisp-format file to the base of a git repository enables customization of the lisp-format behavior.

Currently lisp-format only exports a single configuration variable which may be customized to run fixers on formatted regions of code. See the documentation of *LISP-FORMAT-FIXERS** for details. For example to remove all tabs add the following:

;; NOTE: unless indent-tabs-mode is `set-default' to nil
;; subsequent fixers after untabify could themselves add
;; tabs.
(set-default 'indent-tabs-mode nil)
(push 'untabify *lisp-format-fixers*)

User-specific customization

User-specific customization of lisp-format may be accomplished by writing emacs-lisp code to an configuration file named ~/.lisp-formatrc in the users home directory. This may be useful for adding directories to the load path searched by lisp-format.

Running lisp-format git hooks

The lisp-format script is appropriate for use in git commit hooks. In fact the git-clang-format script may be fairly trivially converted into a git-lisp-format script by replacing "clang" with "lisp" and changing the in-scope file extensions as follows.

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/llvm-mirror/clang/master/tools/clang-format/git-clang-format \
    |sed \
    "s/clang-format/lisp-format/g;s/clangFormat/lispFormat/;
     s/default_extensions =.*\$/default_extensions = ','.join(['lisp','cl','asd','scm','el'])/;
     /# From clang\/lib\/Frontend\/FrontendOptions.cpp, all lower case/,/])/d" \
    > /usr/bin/git-lisp-format

chmod +x /usr/bin/git-lisp-format

After the resulting git-lisp-format is added to your path then git can execute this file by running "git lisp-format."

See setting up git clang format for an example description of a work flow leveraging git hooks and git-clang-format to ensure that code is well formatted before every commit (i.e., by writing the following shell code to an executable file named pre-commit in a repository's .git/hooks/ directory). This work flow may be trivially adopted to use git-lisp-format for lispy code.

It is relatively easy to configure git to run lisp-format before every commit, and reject commits which are not well formatted. The following two subsections describe how to do this using a Pre-commit hook shell script or using the Pre-commit framework.

Pre-commit hook shell script

#!/bin/bash
# pre-commit shell script to run git-lisp-format.
OUTPUT=$(git lisp-format --diff)
if [ "${OUTPUT}" == "no modified files to format" ] ||
   [ "${OUTPUT}" == "lisp-format did not modify any files" ];then
    exit 0
else
    echo "Run git lisp-format, then commit."
    exit 1
fi

Pre-commit framework

The .pre-commit-hooks.yaml file in this directory provides a pre-commit framework hook for running lisp-format. This hook requires the pre-commit framework to be installed on your system and configured for each git repository. For more information please refer to:

• pre-commit installation
• pre-commit plugins (.pre-commit-config.yaml)
• pre-commit usage
• pre-commit hook list