[Nano-devel] Line endings

[Roland Glenn McIntosh]

Currently Nano is pretty dumb about line endings, compared to vim.  I 
would very much like to see a feature to preserve original line endings 
with logic similar to this:

   1) if a file is all CRLR, open it as DOS and save it as DOS.  Do not 
show ^M characters.  put "DOS" in the status line or similar notice.
   2) if a file is all CR, open it as Unix and save it as Unix.
   3) if a file has both CR and CRLF, assume unix.  Show ^M chars.

I'm running nano 1.2.4 which I compiled myself on the latest Cygwin, 
using ncurses.  I was trying to recommend it to a friend to edit his 
/cygdrive/c/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts file, but even though set 
noconvert was in my .nanorc, after saving it got saved with both CR and 
CRLF terminators.  The ^Ms are really ugly too.

I'm fully aware that you can use M-D when saving to direct nano to save 
in DOS format, however this extra step is beyond what I can expect my 
users to remember.  From their perspective they edited the hosts file, 
saw some ugly ^M characters, added a line, saved it, and now it "won't 
work right" in Windows Notepad (mixed line endings).

Nano works beautifully in mostly-unix file environments.  I'd love to be 
able to recommend this editor under Windows platforms, if only it "did 
the right thing" with respect to line endings.

Thank you.
-Roland McIntosh