Atom text editor adds "^M" to empty lines

Question

Atom text editor adds this symbol to every empty line.

Any idea what and why?

Answer 1

I'm on Ubuntu Linux and noticed the ^M (Carriage Return, Line Feed) during git diff.

Somehow CRLF was selected at the bottom of the status bar:

I simply clicked it and changed to LF:

It seems to be set on a file-by-file basis so will need to be changed for each problem file.

---

In my case somehow all the line endings had been changed so git diff was a sea of red. I used the following to identify 'real' changes:

git diff --ignore-space-at-eol

However, git commit would still bury the 'real' changes in commit history so I:

1. ran git stash save
2. changed line endings in atom
3. ran git commit -am "fix line endings"
4. ran git stash apply

Now the line endings are gone and commits can be made on a precise diff.

Answer 2

Are you using Atom text editor under Windows?
Windows carriage return is \r\n while it is \n in Unix.
^M ( 0xD or \r ) is the carriage return character in Windows.
I think, that file was previously saved under Unix ( and already have \n on each line), so Atom is adding \r as required by Windows.

For more information you can see this and this

Answer 3

Check your bottom of the editor which might have changed your file line endings.

Usually it is LF for Unix

and CRLF for windows