primate fmt

Rewrites .prim files to canonical form. There’s exactly one canonical form, defined by Formatting. primate fmt has no formatter knobs.

Usage

primate fmt path/to/file.prim       # format one file in place
primate fmt path/to/dir             # format every .prim file under dir
primate fmt                         # format everything under `input`

primate fmt reads primate.toml to find the input directory.

Flags

• --check — don’t write; exit non-zero if any file would change. Use this in CI.
• --stdin — read source from stdin and write the formatted output to stdout. Used by editor “format buffer” integrations.

Examples

Format on save in CI-friendly form:

# fail the job if anything's unformatted
primate fmt --check

One-off pipe:

cat draft.prim | primate fmt --stdin > clean.prim

Behavior

primate fmt parses each file. If parsing produces errors, the formatter refuses to rewrite and surfaces the diagnostics — it won’t rewrite a file it can’t parse cleanly.

The generated output is byte-for-byte deterministic given the input, so the formatter is idempotent: running it twice changes nothing.

See also

• Formatting — the rules.
• primate build — generates the output files.
• primate lsp — the LSP exposes formatting via textDocument/formatting, which uses the same logic.