The distinction between CR and LF does seem kind of pointless - why would you want to move to the beginning of a line without also advancing to the next line? This is another analog artifact, as Wikipedia explains: In all honesty, I'm not quite old enough to have used electric typewriters, so I have a dim recollection, at best, of the entire process. On a typewriter, pressing Line Feed causes the carriage roller to push up one line - without changing the position of the carriage itself - while the Carriage Return lever slides the carriage back to the beginning of the line. The Carriage Return (CR) and Line Feed (LF) terms derive from manual typewriters, and old printers based on typewriter-like mechanisms (typically referred to as 'Daisywheel' printers). But newlines aren't a universally accepted standard they are different depending who you ask, and what platform they happen to be computing on: The invisible problem characters in this case are newlines.ĭid you ever wonder what was at the end of your lines? As a programmer, I knew there were end of line characters, but I honestly never thought much about them.

The answer to this puzzle lies in our old friend, invisible characters that we can't see but that are totally not out to get us. Opening the file in a different, smarter text editor results in the file displayed properly in multiple paragraphs. You'll be asked permission to overwrite the current file.Have you ever opened a simple little ASCII text file to see it inexplicably displayed as onegiantunbrokenline? This shows the option Save with Encoding. and clicking the down-arrow on the right side of the save-button. Changing the encoding and line-endings for a file can be done using Save File As. Note: Since Visual Studio 2017 there is no option in the File-menu called Advanced Save Options. Additionally it supplies buttons and short-cuts to modify all line-endings in a document, or a selection. There is a minimal extension adding the displaying of end-of-line characters (LF and CR) to the visual white space mode, as you would expect. In Visual Studio 2015, 20 the default keyboard shortcut still is CTRL+ R, CTRL+ WĪll default shortcuts End-of-line characters The actual command name is: Edit.ViewWhiteSpace.

If you want to add the button to a toolbar, it is called Toggle Visual Space in the command category 'Edit'. You can toggle the visibility of the white space characters from the menu:

Visual studio show line endings