Binary (ne’s manual)

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#### 4.9.3 Binary

Syntax: `Binary [0|1]`
Abbreviation: `B`

sets the binary flag. When this flag is true, loading and saving a document is performed in a different way. On loading, only nulls are considered newlines; on saving, nulls are saved instead of newlines. This allows you to edit a binary file, fix some text in it, and save it without modifying anything else. Normally, line feeds, carriage returns and nulls are considered newlines, so that what you load will have all nulls and carriage returns substituted by newlines when saved.

Note that since usually binary files contain a great number of nulls, and every null will be considered a line terminator, the memory necessary for loading a binary file can be several times bigger than the length of the file itself. Thus, binary editing within `ne` should be considered not a normal activity, but rather an exceptional one.

If you invoke `Binary` with no arguments, it will toggle the flag. If you specify 0 or 1, the flag will be set to false or true, respectively. An upper case ‘`B`’ will appear on the status bar if the flag is true. If false, a ‘`-`’ or ‘`!`’ will indicate whether the last line of the document is empty, which will determine whether the resulting file will have a normal line termination when the document is saved.