When the tracked contents have CRLF line endings, colored diff output
shows "^M" at the end of output lines, which is distracting, even though
the pager we use by default ("less") knows to hide them.
The problem is that "less" hides a carriage-return only at the end of the
line, immediately before a line feed. The colored diff output does not
take this into account, and emits four element sequence for each line:
- force this color;
- the line up to but not including the terminating line feed;
- reset color
- line feed.
By including the carriage return at the end of the line in the second
item, we are breaking the smart our pager has in order not to show "^M".
This can be fixed by changing the sequence to:
- force this color;
- the line up to but not including the terminating end-of-line;
- reset color
- end-of-line.
where end-of-line is either a single linefeed or a CRLF pair. When the
output is not colored, "force this color" and "reset color" sequences are
both empty, so we won't have this problem with or without this patch.