Install astyle with Homebrew, apk, chocolatey, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, scoop, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• astyle

Project history

The official release archive traces the lineage back to ASBeautifier 0.8.0, described as the first public release and a direct C++ port of JSBeautifier 1.1.1 with extensions for C++ indentation. Artistic Style 1.0.0 followed on November 24, 1998, with behavior that retained the original filename and wrote the preformatted source to a .orig backup.

By 1999 the project had added a formatting layer around the beautifier, brace placement modes, and operator padding. The 1.x line accumulated C, C++, Java, namespace, pointer, reference, and recursive processing behavior over several years; later 2.x releases broadened language handling and build support, while 3.x releases modernized the codebase and options.

The current project site describes Artistic Style as free, fast, and small, written in C++, usable either as a command-line program or as a library. The official source repository page says day-to-day development now happens in the GitLab repository, while the SourceForge SVN repository is kept up to date regularly.

Adoption history

AStyle became widely packaged because it solved a boring cross-language problem with a small native binary and no editor dependency. The input package facts list packages across Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Alpine, Chocolatey, Scoop, MacPorts, Nix, and openSUSE.

Its adoption path also runs through editors and IDEs. The official site notes applications that use Artistic Style as contributed software, either embedding it or calling the command-line program, and it documents compile options for shared and static libraries, JNI, and examples for multiple host languages.

How it is used

Users invoke astyle on one or more source files, with options controlling brace style, indentation, padding, pointer/reference alignment, recursive processing, backup suffixes, and language mode. By default, formatted files retain their original names and backups are created unless disabled.

Option files are a core part of real-world usage. The manual documents default option files such as ~/.astylerc on Unix-like systems and %APPDATA%\astylerc on Windows, plus project option files named .astylerc or _astylerc found from the project root or parent paths. Command-line options override project options, which override default options.

Why package nerds care

AStyle is the sort of formatter that package managers keep forever: tiny, native, scriptable, no runtime service, and useful both before and after editor integrations. It sits in the same historical shelf as indent-style tools that developers wired into Makefiles, hooks, IDE commands, and release scripts before opinionated single-language formatters took over.

Its long release archive is also valuable package archaeology. You can watch a formatter evolve from ASBeautifier and early brace placement into modern C++ support, project config files, fuzzing fixes, CMake builds, shell completions, and issue-driven maintenance.

Timeline

• 1998: ASBeautifier 0.8.0 was published as the first public release.
• 1998-11-24: Artistic Style 1.0.0 was released.
• 2010-11: Artistic Style 2.01 was released.
• 2017-04: Artistic Style 3.0 was released.
• 2018-01: Artistic Style 3.1 added project option files and changed the Windows default option path to APPDATA.
• 2022-11-20: The GitLab project record was created for the current day-to-day Git repository.
• 2024-08: Artistic Style 3.6 was released.
• 2025-07: Artistic Style 3.6.10 appeared in the official release notes.

Related projects

• ASBeautifier and JSBeautifier are the named predecessors in the official release archive.
• Editor and IDE integrations commonly call AStyle or embed its library.
• clang-format is a later formatter often compared with AStyle in C and C++ workflows, though it is not an upstream dependency.

Sources

• https://astyle.sourceforge.net/
• https://astyle.sourceforge.net/astyle.html
• https://astyle.sourceforge.net/news.html
• https://astyle.sourceforge.net/notes.html
• https://astyle.sourceforge.net/notesArchives.html
• https://astyle.sourceforge.net/subversion.html
• https://gitlab.com/saalen/astyle