# Oxfmt

14 Hacker News commenters recommended Oxfmt and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Fast Rust-based formatter people use as a Prettier replacement, often alongside Oxlint. Critics say running it with no arguments recursively scans the directory tree.

## Why people recommend it

- Drop-in replacement for Prettier (4 comments): "It's amazing, especially in combination with Oxfmt instead of prettier." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49974279)) "You can replace eslint and prettier with Biome or Oxlint + Oxfmt." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46564820)) "eslint/prettier with oxlint/oxfmt" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50244539))
- Much faster than Prettier and ESLint (4 comments): "Instead of talking about hypothetical Oxlint and Oxfmt performance improvements, I had both benchmarked against ESLint and Prettier within the hour." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271883)) "the time to process a codebase went from like way over a minute with the old tools to a few seconds with theirs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213884)) "replaces prettier and is faster since it isn't written in JavaScript" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48762207))
- Part of the Vite toolchain (3 comments): "I love Vite, Vitest, Oxlint and Oxfmt and look in their direction for most of my new projects!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760812)) "Sure beats opening some ancient project and seeing some mix of Vite, Vitest, Oxlint and Oxfmt" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48761450)) "Extremely happy user of Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, tsdown, Oxlint, and Oxfmt." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48762400))
- Does what you ask (2 comments): "oxfmt did what you asked it to do." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120529)) "Oxfmt got it, and then won." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067909))

## What people warn about

- Recursively scans directory when run bare (5 comments): "If someone runs a tool without args, the tool should do equivalent of "tool --help" It is bad ux." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120746)) "running oxfmt without any arguments recursively scans directory tree from the current directory" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120110)) "this is definitely not what I'd expect from a program run without arguments" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120573))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [gofmt](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gofmt.md): 26 recommend
- [Black](https://hackerapproved.com/p/black.md): 18 recommend
- [FracturedJson](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fracturedjson.md): 18 recommend
- [Prettier](https://hackerapproved.com/p/prettier.md): 16 recommend
- [clang-format](https://hackerapproved.com/p/clang-format.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Oxfmt", https://hackerapproved.com/p/oxfmt/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).