dfmt: format paragraphs, comments and doc strings

Overview

dfmt is a Python command line tool that can reformat text, allowing you to go from:

this is a pretty big sentence with lots of words that takes a lot of horizontal space

to:

this is a pretty big sentence with lots
of words that takes a lot of horizontal
space

It can also be used to format paragraphs in comments and doc strings.

Input:

/**
 * This is a very long line in a Doxygen comment that takes a lot of space
 */

Output:

/**
 * This is a very long line in a
 * Doxygen comment that takes a lot of
 * space
 */

The recommended way is to use pipx to install dfmt. You can also use pip directly if you know what you are doing.

Send the text to stdin, and dfmt will write the results to stdout.

By default, text is wrapped at 80 characters. You can use the -w,--width option to set a different size.

As such, dfmt can be used in a number of text editors.

dfmt contains an hard-coded list of known prefixes.

It will start by splitting the input in "regions" that start with the same prefix.

Then it will use the textwrap module from the Python standard library to wrap each region while keeping the existing prefix.