I agree to all of that, except for the last part. I don't like these scripts, since teaching programmers in the first place on a good coding style in is the better way to enforce it.
Oh well we'll have to agree to disagree on this (again :-)
I've never found manual style enforcement to be efficient or effective, & "teaching good style" comes back to personal decisions about what is "good".
The learning curve on
project-specific style is mostly quite short, while this scripts make programmers just careless about coding style in general (not project specific), and might be buggy at times messing up style everywhere.
Yes, normally I recommend using one of the mature formatters, even dear old GNU indent, since they are less likely to be buggy, but then turning off all the features you don't want is not always easy. Most give options like: for this code feature do this or do that but no option to do nothing. So sometimes limited scripts are the way to go, especially for projects with established styles that don't quite match the programs. In past experiments and discussions with Nick I never came up with one that quite matched Geany.
Cheers Lex