Windows Git Tip: Hide ^M (Carriage Return) in Diff

A common point of confusion when getting started with Git on Windows is line endings, with Windows still using CR+LF while every other modern OS uses LF only. Git provides three ways to deal with this discrepancy, as described in the msysGit installer:

1. Checkout Windows-style, commit Unix-style (core.autocrlf = true)
2. Checkout as-is, commit Unix-style (core.autocrlf = input)
3. Checkout as-is, commit as-is (core.autocrlf = false)

The first option is the default, which I find rather unfortunate—I don’t consider line ending manipulation to be the responsibility of my VCS. Instead, I prefer to keep core.autocrlf set to false and let my text editors deal with line endings. (If you like having core.autocrlf set to true or input, I’d love to hear why.)

One downside of turning off autocrlf is that the output of git diff highlights CR characters (indicated by ^M) as whitespace errors. To turn off this “error”, you can use the core.whitespace setting:

git config --global core.whitespace cr-at-eol

If your core.whitespace is already set, you should add cr-at-eol to the end of the comma-delimited list instead.