This isn't really the case, though. Lots of options are completely orthogonal (e.g. tabs vs spaces and function brace style don't really affect each other). My

This isn't really the case, though. Lots of options are completely orthogonal (e.g. tabs vs spaces and function brace style don't really affect each other). My experience with clang-format has been that each option (mostly) only affects a single token type, which is determined using clang as a backend. I've only seen satisfactory results. If you don't have as powerful a backend as the full clang paraer/lexer on the other hand, I could quickly see things breaking as you described.