Re: Default line endings on Mac

[John W. Eaton]

On 1/10/19 12:54 PM, Andrew Janke wrote:
> Hi, Octave maintainers,
>
> On macOS, at least with a Qt build, the default EOL mode for Octave as 
> of 4.4.1 is "Mac (CR)".
>
> I think this might be an archaism: "Mac" (\r) EOL mode text files were 
> used by pre-OS X Mac OSes like Mac OS 9. Since the switch to the 
> Unix-based OS X, Mac programs generally default to Unix style (\n) line 
> endings. You can verify this by opening TextEdit and creating a new 
> plain text file: it uses \n EOLs.
>
> Having files created in legacy Mac (\r) mode makes it a bit harder to 
> use Unix command line tools and stuff like GitHub with those files.
>
> Can/should Octave be changed to default to Unix (\n) EOLs on macOS?

If that is what is currently used by default on macos by other 
applications then I think we should switch.  We would, of course, still 
support files with CR line endings, but create new files with LF.

Do we currently detect the line endings in the file and try to match the 
usage?  If not, should we?  How difficult would it be?

Now, if Windows would just abandon CRLF in favor of LF only...

jwe