überfmt

Überfmt formats paragraphs of plain text so that each line is close to the optimal length. It is an upgrade over GNU fmt and BSD fmt in that it supports Unicode and automatically recognizes comment-like formatting.

For example überfmt will translate this badly formatted fragment of text:

/* Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
 * consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam placerat faucibus
 * luctus. Donec dolor lorem.
 */

into the following, all while preserving the comment structure:

/* Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
 * Aliquam placerat faucibus luctus. Donec dolor lorem.
 */

Überfmt is language-agnostic and will work equally well for most conventionally-formatted comment styles: C, Shell, Pascal, everything goes.

How to use?

Pipe your text into the standard input of the uberfmt command, collect the formatted text on the output.

The author also uses the following Vim shortcuts:

nmap \f vap!uberfmt<CR>
vmap \f !uberfmt<CR>

This way pressing \f inside a paragraph (or after selecting a fragment of text) will reformat it with uberfmt.

How to install?

Install it from PyPI:

python3 -m pip install --user --upgrade uberfmt

This should place a small script into your ~/.local/bin folder, and if it is in your PATH, you should be able to use uberfmt right away.

Alternatively just download uberfmt from Github; it’s a single file program.