Do not auto-add a newline at EOF

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created December 31, 2010 · complexity basic · author Jo Liss · version 7.0

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neither of these methods works for any line ending other than Unix, and in fact both will silently convert your alternate line-ending files to Unix format

By default, Vim adds a newline after the last line of each file. That's great for new files, but when you edit other people's files and they don't have newlines at the end, the diff gets cluttered with an extra chunk like this, because Vim "helpfully" added a newline:

-  }
\ No newline at end of file
+  }

To stop this from happening, add this to your .vimrc:

set binary

Caveats:

This will silently convert all line endings to Unix format, so it's probably not usable on Windows.
Options textwidth, wrapmargin, modeline and expandtab are reset by :set binary, so make sure that "set binary" comes before setting any of these options.

Always remove newlines at EOF

If you want to always strip newlines from files (even new ones), you can try this:[1]

au BufWritePre * :set binary | set noeol
au BufWritePost * :set nobinary | set eol

References

Comments

Though, I don't know why this is really useful, but since this has been asked in the mailinglist at least twice, I have come up with the following workaround, that keeps the DOS Line-endings while writing without a final EOF:

fun! WriteFileWithoutEOF()
  let a=getline(1,line('$')-1)
  call map(a, 'v:val . nr2char(13)')
  call extend(a, getline('$', '$'))
  call writefile(a,fnamemodify(@%, ':p'), 'b')
  unlet a
endfun

au BufWriteCmd filename :call WriteFileWithoutEOF()

Disclaimer: This should work, but I haven't tested it. Chrisbra 22:18, January 25, 2011 (UTC)

Ah, thanks for posting a solution for them Windows folks. Since you asked why this is useful: Quite a few editors and IDEs (especially on Windows, I'll presume) display an extra blank line if you have a newline at the end. That's probably not correct behavior, but it might have led some shops to have a no-newline-at-EOF,-ever policy. If you come from Unix, you'll probably find that cringeworthy, but hey... -- Jo Liss 23:55, January 25, 2011 (UTC)

This script looks promising! It does come with some new caveats, though. Since it bypasses the normal write mechanisms, the 'backup', 'writebackup', etc. options don't apply, correct? Probably we want to detect when the file already does not have a final line ending, or when creating a file (possibly in a specific location), and only create the autocmd for these specific files (so we'd have a BufRead and/or BufNewFile autocmd, which creates this new BufWriteCmd autocmd). Assuming I'm correct about 'backup' and the like, I would only want this method to take effect in certain situations, or we can look at these options and take appropriate action.

According to :help BufWriteCmd, we need to set the modified flag appropriately after the write, depending on the cpo-+ setting. I note that the current example does not do this. Can we set the option directly, or do we need to use setbufvar()? This has bitten me in the past for some autocmd events, and I have never used BufWriteCmd before.

--Fritzophrenic 16:41, January 26, 2011 (UTC)

Do not auto-add a newline at EOF

Always remove newlines at EOF

References

Comments

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