[X-Unix] Why didn't Apple change the line break ?

William H. Magill magill at mcgillsociety.org
Tue Sep 21 19:47:36 PDT 2004


On 21 Sep, 2004, at 18:50, Doug McNutt wrote:
> On Sep 21, 2004, at 7:02 AM, James Bucanek wrote:
>>
>> Because, as Eugene pointed out, your text editor sucks.  Get a decent 
>> one like BBEdit or TextWrangler.  Even Apple's bundled TextEdit will 
>> handle most line endings correctly.
>
> Can anyone suggest an editor that will allow MIXED line breaks in a 
> document? Yes. They occur and there are reasons for leaving them alone 
> while making small corrections.
>
> BBEdit insists on changing them to be all the same at save time. MPW 
> insists on classic mode. TextEdit gets all wrapped up in RTF.

Emacs will normally assume that the file is a standard Unix text file 
unless you change modes.  As such, it will display the "^M" for the 
carriage-returns on lines where they exist and nothing on lines where a 
"lf" is all that exists. You can force either format when you write the 
file back out, but if you stay with the default-unix encoding it should 
write out exactly as it was read in... with the mix of cr and lf (and 
whatever else) characters.

I believe this should be true with the default configuration of emacs. 
However, I do have my own .emacs initialization file which sets the 
default mode to "text."
         (setq default-major-mode 'text-mode)



T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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