Install bcpp with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• bcpp
• cb++

Project history

The Invisible Island page says bcpp was written by Steven De Toni and that Thomas E. Dickey's maintained version was based on version 1.8 from December 1995.

Dickey's version kept the original design while improving the parser, marking character state, recognizing more indentation structures, and adding simple embedded-SQL indentation. The public changelog begins in 1996 and continues with portability and maintenance updates into the 2020s.

Adoption history

bcpp has the footprint of a long-lived Unix formatting utility: small, source-distributed, and packaged by Homebrew, Debian, MacPorts, Ubuntu, and openSUSE-family package sets in the supplied package-manager facts.

Its 2012 changelog notes integration of Debian packaging patches, including searching for bcpp.cfg in a user's home directory and an optional compile-time directory.

How it is used

Users run bcpp or cb++ to reindent C/C++ source, tune behavior through command-line options or bcpp.cfg, and preserve long statements rather than using it as a full code reflow tool.

It is most relevant for legacy C/C++ style normalization, old trees, and users who want a formatter less ambitious than clang-format or GNU indent.

Why package nerds care

bcpp is a compact example of the pre-clang-format formatter era: a focused utility with decades of packaging inertia and maintenance for old compilers, old Unix systems, and distribution conventions.

For package nerds, its value is historical texture as much as raw popularity: it shows how source-formatting tools survived as tiny standalone packages before modern language-server and formatter ecosystems consolidated.

Timeline

• 1995: Steven De Toni's bcpp 1.8, the base for the maintained Invisible Island version.
• 1996: Invisible Island changelog begins with parser and indentation work.
• 2012: Debian-derived config-file search and packaging scripts integrated.
• 2020s: Changelog continues with configure-script, portability, and hardening updates.

Related projects

• GNU indent is the classic formatter bcpp explicitly contrasts with.
• clang-format is the modern C/C++ formatter that overlaps with many current use cases.
• Invisible Island hosts and maintains the current source release and changelog.

Sources

• https://invisible-island.net/bcpp/CHANGES.html
• https://invisible-island.net/bcpp/bcpp.html
• source_facts.package-manager