I take it as a fundamental tenet of source control systems that I can put a file in now and get it out later, unchanged. Git breaks this rule: Git can convert line endings, which which regularly causes confusion and file corruption. Let’s stop that from happening.

The problem + background

• If you tell Git to convert line endings to UNIX style (LF), it will corrupt binary files that happen to contain a 0D0A sequence.
• .cmd scripts must use CRLF line endings (see https://www.dostips.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8988)
• it’s super-confusing when a text file is checked out with one kind of line ending on one machine and another kind of line ending on another machine

Git’s .gitattributes file defaults to treating every file as text which means:

• the file is eligble for line-endings conversion
• git diff should show the diffs (GitHub appears to respect this as well)

The solution

Every repo should have a .gitattributes file containing:

* -text diff

this means:

• no files are eligble for line-ending conversion
• show diffs

In my opinion, git init should create this .gitattributes file, avoiding a lot of confusion and file corruption. Until the maintainers of Git accept this suggestion, you have to do it yourself.

Also, you may want to disable diffs for any binary files you add by appending something like:

.png binary