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I tried searching with pacman -Ss for clang-format, git-clang-format, etc, but I'm not having any luck.

However, I have seen some references to it on some other websites, implying it may exist (or have existed) somewhere.

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5 Answers 5

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As utilities, clang-format and git-clang-format are available in several forms:

  • As a part of clang.

[As noted by OP in the final comments below, and with OP's answer to their own question, these should be included with MSYS2/MingGW on Windows].

  • As pre-compiled Python wheels for Linux and Windows available via pip (PyPI).

  • As modules available for Node.js. On Windows, use the standard Windows installer to install Node.js. Otherwise, example Linux package manager commands for installing Node.js are here.

Python

For Python versions on Linux or Windows, you may wish to try:

python3 -m pip install clang-format

Node.js

Assuming Node.js is installed, you can also get them both with:

npm install -g clang-format

Note that on Windows, using the Node.js option seems to be the simplest solution for obtaining just clang-format and git-clang-format (without installing MinGW).

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    The nodejs modules are just wrappers around the real clang-format, from what I can tell on that page. Doesn't that mean the normal clang-format executable still has to be installed somewhere, or did I misunderstand?
    – Tyler Shellberg
    Commented Nov 26, 2019 at 16:52
  • Is npm available on mingw/mingw64? I attempted Pacman -Ss npm and as well for "node", but got no results related to node-js.
    – Tyler Shellberg
    Commented Nov 26, 2019 at 17:08
  • No luck with nodejs either. Wondering if it's possible to build clang-format from source. clang, clang-analyzer, clang-tools-extra, compiler-rt, libblocksruntime (all version 9) are all available on mingw. Apparently clang itself isn't enough to run the compiler though.
    – Tyler Shellberg
    Commented Nov 26, 2019 at 17:18
  • I saw that you updated your post. With Python3, I get: ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement clang-format (from versions: none) ERROR: No matching distribution found for clang-format. For nodejs, I cannot find how to install it on mingw.
    – Tyler Shellberg
    Commented Nov 26, 2019 at 18:02
  • Both of those alternative commands failed with the same error. No idea what you mean by "specialized".
    – Tyler Shellberg
    Commented Nov 26, 2019 at 18:18
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You can get it as part of the LLVM compiler build for Windows. You can download it from https://llvm.org/builds/. Once installed, clang-format.exe can be found in C:\Program Files\LLVM\bin.

I know it's a bit heavy to install the whole compiler just to get the formatter, but yeah, it just feels safer compared to other sources, given that it's from LLVM itself.

Besides, the installer holds an archive that several tools (e.g. 7-Zip) can open. If you have downloaded the installer, but do not want to install the whole thing, extract the single executable from the archive under bin.

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    One can directly download clang-format.exe and add it to PATH without installing LLVM. It is available at the bottom of the page builds.
    – Burak
    Commented May 11, 2021 at 21:38
  • The link in builds is old and points to version 12. The latest builds can be found on the LLVM github releases and a quick search showed that version 16.04 has a win64.exe github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases?page=1
    – Greg
    Commented Jun 4, 2023 at 1:32
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It turns out that MSYS2 already comes with clang installed, and clang comes with clang-format. As of my version of clang, I have clang-format 9.0.0 installed. it's possible much earlier versions of clang did not come with it installed.

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I solved this problem by doing the following:

  1. I opened MSYS2 MINGW64

  2. I ran pacman -S clang and followed the prompts to install it.

  3. I ran where clang-format to learn of its location (in my case it was C:\msys64\usr\bin\clang-format.exe)

  4. I added its folder path (C:\msys64\usr\bin\) to Windows' user and system Path variable.

All shells could then find clang-format and after restarting it, VS Code knew about it too.

nb: it could be that clang maybe overkill just for this command - a better pacman command might be adequate here.

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The clang package was not available in my MSYS2 installation by default, so I had to install it:

pacman -Sy --needed mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-clang

You can see where the binary is installed (to add to your PATH, if needed) with the command:

pacman -Ql mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-clang | grep bin/clang-format

The output should looks something like this:

mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-clang /ucrt64/bin/clang-format.exe
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