Can we support CR line endings as well as LF and CRLF?

[davidgiven]

VSCode supports LF line endings, and CRLF line endings, but it doesn't support CR line endings.

Any chance of support for this? There are some exotic platforms which still require them, such as e.g. pre OSX MacOS, and the amount of work involved ought to be trivial. This is ff=mac mode in vim.

I've tried manually setting files.eol to "\r", but the value is rejected as being invalid.

Right now, if you try to open a CR file in VSCode it gets normalised to CRLF, which is incorrect. At the very least stopping this from happening would be nice.

[jrial]

Duplicate of #31286

[leebehrens]

I have a pile of HL7v2 file I need to edit. VSCode has a couple excellent HL7 extensions that would make VSCode a dream for what I need to do, but the lack of support of CR as end of line is killing that dream.

[medo64]

Are there any changes in the regards to CR line ending support?

May 2020 Release Notes make mention of CR being supported:

VS Code currently recognizes CR (Carriage Return), LF (Line Feed), and CRLF as line terminators.

However, based on my testing, CR is still not supported.

[hopeseekr]

What operating system still uses CR line returns? I am of the understanding that it's extinct in modern platforms.

Why do you want support for it???

[medo64]

For me personally, I found CRs in three places:

1. Electronics: There are plenty protocols that result in CR line endings when dealing with industrial/health devices. HL7 mentioned by leebehjrens is just one of them. Quite a lot of industry controllers are using CR too. I can honestly say I see CR on something still at least once a year (last was internal protocol of CyberPower OR500LCDRM1U UPS). And yes, usually they end up being converted to CRLF (I know :)) or LF immediately on import/capture but I still need to use Notepad++ to check them.

2. Test cases: I often write file parsers (usually to parse various electronics' devices output) and I generally want them to support CRLF, LF, CR, or any mix above. Currently I cannot actually create test files with CR or mixed endings using VSCode. Even worse, VSCode actually actively corrupts those test files by normalizing line endings (see also issue #127).

3. Old computers: It's not just old Mac OS but a lot of golden hardware like C64 and/or ZX spectrum that need CR. I admit that this one is the weakest argument as the vast majority of files I use to play with them is equally old and just copied around. Still, for rare editing sessions, I still have to use Notepad++.

[jrial]

What operating system still uses CR line returns? I am of the understanding that it's extinct in modern platforms.

Why do you want support for it???

Some devs may have legitimate reasons to work with these older formats, e.g. for study, software preservation, or to fix issues with legacy systems that are still in use, and that's just the reasons I could come up with in the time it took me to type it out.