How can I tell clang-format to indent visibility modifiers?

Question

I want my visibility modifiers (public, protected and private) to be indented by clang-format who currently leaves them at the same level as the class declaration. I've looked for indent and visibility on a dump of the default format options but couldn't find anything.

Answer 1

From the Clang-Format Style Options documentation:

AccessModifierOffset (int) The extra indent or outdent of access modifiers, e.g. public:.

So, add the appropriate entry to your .clang-format. For example,

AccessModifierOffset: 2

Answer 2

If you want to give the access modifiers themselves their own level of indentation, you can use IndentAccessModifiers: true. This will give you code that looks like the following.

class my_class {
  public:
    my_class() = default;
};

With IndentAccessModifiers: false, by default you'll get the access modifiers not indented at all, and class members will be indented only one level beyond the surrounding scope.

class my_class {
public:
  my_class() = default;
};

You can then use AccessModifierOffset to adjust the alignment of the access modifiers only, without affecting the alignment of the class members. With IndentAccessModifiers: false and AccessModifierOffset: 1, you'd get this.

class my_class {
 public:
  my_class() = default;
};

With IndentAccessModifiers: true, AccessModifierOffset is ignored.

I'm sure all reasonable programmers would agree that only one of these options is even remotely acceptable. Though they probably wouldn't agree on which one it is.