cmake-init-fetchcontent VS cmake_format

You can see that in action here: https://github.com/friendlyanon/cmake-init-fetchcontent This example has the idiomatic find_package(headeronly REQUIRED) call in the CMakeLists.txt, but when configuring ${sourceDir}/cmake/find is added to CMAKE_MODULE_PATH, so the FetchContent code is run to "find" the dependency. There are comments to further explain this.

Please consider using https://github.com/friendlyanon/cmake-init before this has any significant amount of users. There is an example that shows you how to still rely on FetchContent as an opt-in.

Are they only on git(hub)? You can write a vcpkg overlay port (example) or use FetchContent if the projects are FetchContent ready in a way that doesn't force FetchContent on people trying to build the project (example).

This came up somewhere else, but I created an example repo that idiomatically uses find_package and an opt-in find module to FetchContent a dependency from GitHub: https://github.com/friendlyanon/cmake-init-fetchcontent

There's a cmake-format project with some linting features, but it's hard to add the checks to clean up the biggest CMake antipatterns because relevant solutions tend to be more opinionated in one direction or another.

Have you considered integrating cmake-format? It requires an extra dependency of course, but you can make it optional.