Usage

The Usage chapters follow the path from a fresh install to a prose check step gating CI, one page per step. This section tells that story against a working project, whereas the Reference section lists every flag and key.

Pick Your Run Shape

The commands below cover almost every run, plus one for adopting a single rule at a time. Each row pairs what you want to do with the command that does it.

Gate CI on pending rewrites. The command exits non-zero when any file would change, and the Quick Start walks the full setup. The Exit Codes reference lists what each exit code means for a CI gate.

prose check .

Rewrite a project in place. The most common command, run against the project root and walked end to end in the Quick Start.

prose format .

Preview a rewrite before writing it. Prints a unified diff and leaves every file as it was. The CLI Reference documents every flag and how the flags combine.

prose format --diff .

Read source from stdin and write to stdout. The form an editor's save hook uses, with the Editor page covering both the language server and the save-hook setup.

prose format -

Adopt one rule at a time. Runs a single rule, so a project can take the rules on one by one. The Quick Start covers it under Subset the active rules.

prose check --select <slug> .

The Section at a Glance

• Installation covers the package managers, post-install verification, and the platforms wheels are built for.
• Quick Start walks each command end to end against a sample project.
• Suppression covers # fmt: off, # fmt: skip, and # prose: ignore[<rule>], one directive per scope.

See Also

• Integrations covers running prose format or prose check from an editor's save event, a pre-commit hook, and a CI job.
• Rules lists every rule Prose runs.
• Primitives covers the Rust types a downstream crate links against.
• Sandbox runs the formatter in the browser on examples taken from the fixture set.