Harmonizing line breaks while working with different OS

When working in a team, someone will be using windows, while some will be on mac. Usually, it won’t be an issue, but windows and mac/linux has a different way to interpret line breaks. It’s not displayed, but a line break consists of 2 characters in windows - CRLF (Carriage return & Line break), but it is only 1 character on mac/linux - LF (Line feed).

Usually the IDE is already defaulted to update the line breaks to the system default, even when the commited code is using another system. Then test failures might occur when your code is comparing texts with line breaks. It occurred to me recently when I was working on a new project. The codes are using LF, and I happen to add a new unit test which compares some huge chunks of text, and I’m on windows with CRLF.

The solution is to set the autocrlf config in my git to true. In this way, git will automatically convert the CRLF to LF when a file is added to the index, and LF to CRLF when code is checked out.

For windows users, git config --global core.autocrlf true.

For linux users, who has someone on the team using windows, git config --global core.autocrlf input. This will convert CRLF to LF when code is committed, but will not convert LF to CRLF when you check out codes.

So in this way, the codes on the repository will keep to just using LF, but allowing windows users to have CRLF when the code is local.

reference: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Configuration