Why do gedit and vim hide the final newline from the user?
Let's assume we have two text documents: Our first file contains " hi " as text. Our second file contains " hi " as text. When we open these two files in gedit, vi, or vim, the two files are visually identical in every way. However, when we run xxd on the files, we get the following: Hex content of our first file reads: 6869 Hex content of our second file reads: 6869 0a Aha! There's an invisible newline. In vim, if we were paying close enough attention to the status bar and happen to understand what [noeol] means, then we might pick up on this, but in gedit, the two files open exactly the same