Aaron Thebailiwick wrote: > Please, oh Vim gurus, explain this binary/noeol situation. It seems to > me that if I open a text file in e.g. metapad or Edit Plus or any of > these other very simple Windows-based text editors, I am able to delete > the "final line break," which appears on screen as though there is a > zero-length line right after the last line of text. I press backspace on > that empty line and it is gone; so is the EOL. > > In order to achieve this in Vim, I must perform strange acrobatics > including turning on "binary," which clobbers my textwidth, wrapmargin, > expandtab, and modeline options, and forces unix-like line separators. > > My only guess is that Vim follows certain established rules for the > formatting of proper text files, but I have run across situations where > I need to edit text files (AS text files) that have no final EOL, and it > pains me that Vim makes this harder than such functionally limited > editors as Edit Plus. > > Is there some Better Way?
I've heard people argue that a newline character separates lines, thus it's not needed or even desired after the last line. That's the theoretical approach. In practice a text file that doesn't have a newline at the end is most probably truncated. Thus it's more practical to see the newline character as a marker for the end of the line. This has been so for ages on Unix and there is no good reason to do otherwise. -- To be rich is not the end, but only a change of worries. /// Bram Moolenaar -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://www.Moolenaar.net \\\ /// sponsor Vim, vote for features -- http://www.Vim.org/sponsor/ \\\ \\\ download, build and distribute -- http://www.A-A-P.org /// \\\ help me help AIDS victims -- http://ICCF-Holland.org ///
