Provide option to opt out of line ending normalisation for files

Upon saving a file edited with VS Code, it appears to perform line ending normalisation automatically and without user notification of any sort. Because of this, I've found myself bitten by large diffs in Git (I'm aware you can circumvent this using the -w flag) where a trivial fix to a single line of source code appears to affect a significant proportion of the file, which makes pull requests and reviews for such changes on GitHub a pain to sift through. Then again, I guess one could argue why a source file with mixed line endings should stay in version control like that anyway!

Visual Studio Community displays a prompt upon opening a file if it has mixed line endings and lets a user decide whether or not to have it fixed.

Version: 0.10.1

(By the way, great work on open sourcing VS Code too, thanks!)

[alexdima]

The current file model normalizes the line endings as soon as the file is read (i.e. each line does not keep track of its EOL), the model only keeps track of one EOL for the entire file (which is computed on file open as the predominantely used EOL character).

@miqid Before we invest a lot into supporting this, when is it desirable to have a file with code that uses mixed EOL sequences? (i.e. why would you want to have a mixed EOL file at all)

Thanks for the insight @alexandrudima - a bit gutted to hear it won't be a trivial change.

Personally, I don't believe having mixed line endings around is a sane thing at all. Where the normalisation becomes a problem for me is when I need to make small edits in source files part of huge code repositories owned by people (usually in the commercial industry) who are extremely stringent on changes they allow through.

I've instead been using the Atom editor to commit changes to files where line endings aren't normalised as it preserves the original line endings of a while on save.

If it is going to be too much effort, I'm happy for the feature request to be closed off as there are alternatives beyond VS Code.

[sleaze]

+1 to that!

[matlimatli]

This would be important when editing files with a binary payload. Think shellscripts with a built-in binary blob, or data files with a plaintext header part.
For me, it would be OK if I could select a number of file extensions for which no conversions are ever applied.

[XFunc]

Clearly, having mixed line endings in source code files is not sane at all. But this is something you often have to deal with in cross-platform development environments (Windows developers not aware at all of the EOL they are inserting in source code files, since the very beginning of the project).
Having the possibility to choose or not EOL normalization would then be great for such scenarios.

Thanks