Can you point me to a few places in phobos where you worry the autoformatter will be undesirable ?
We use something like clang_format on a large code base and it just works. For the rare cases where one wants to override the autoformatter, we can include a special tag in comments. The need for those annotations should be quite rare. Example: // @NOFORMAT_BEGIN void my_specially_formatted_fun(){ int[]x=[0,1,2, 4,5,6]; } // @NOFORMAT_END or with a single statement, which shall apply to the following logical block: // @NOFORMAT_BLOCK void my_specially_formatted_fun(){ int[]x=[0,1,2, 4,5,6]; } (Another option would be user defined attributes although I doubt that's a good use of those). Note, comments shouldn't be touched typically, but could be formatted on demand with dfmt begin_line end_line (clang_format has such an option). As for line breaks, I would argue that a much better behavior is to simply use soft line wraps, as supported by most modern editors, so there would be no need for them (I personally hate hard line wraps which creates unnecessary overflow/underflow problems in comments and many other issues). I personally don't care much for minute formatting details but some do, so having such a tool makes formatting related problems just go away. I believe it can be done for D with almost no need for special override markers, and the benefits will largely outweigh the inconvenience of few places requiring them.