vimpowershell

Vim on Windows started showing ^M characters

I am on Windows 7 running PowerShell version 2.0.

I used the following PowerShell code (from this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/65148/360840) to modify my PowerShell profile:

"`nNew-Alias which get-command" | add-content $profile

As expected, it appended the line in question to my profile BUT afterwards, my Vim sessions started showing ^M characters at the end of each line. Very strange! Any clue on what caused it and how to fix it? I tried set fileformat=dos in Vim but it did nothing.

Here's my Vim version information:

vim version

(Not sure how to make the picture larger - this is not its normal size.)

Solution

  • The problem was that the file became corrupted. In such a case, Vim starts displaying ^M characters to alert you to the problem. The fix was to manually remove these characters (%s/^M//g).

    Still not clear to me, because these characters are SUPPOSED TO BE in the file as Windows file format uses them. But at least the problem was solved.

    EDIT: Please see the exchange of comments w/ dash-tom-bang, which provides clarification.