Editing tab-delimited .txt files from Excel in vim

Question

When I save a simple spreadsheet in Excel 15.41 (on Mac) as tab-delimited .txt and open it using vim <filename>, I see characters for carriage returns as ^M, but everything is on one line. There is one $ character shown at the end of the single line when I use :set list:

1^I2^I3^I4^M1^I2^I3^I4^M1^I2^I3^I4$     

Because fileformat=unix for this file, I expected to see no carriage return characters. Does anyone know why I'm seeing the opposite? I am also unsure of why all lines are read as one following this procedure.

When I save the same spreadsheet as UTF-16 unicode .txt and open it using vim, fileformat=dos. :set list properly shows line ending characters, but there are no carriage return characters. My understanding was that DOS files should also contain a carriage return at line endings.

1^I2^I3^I4$     
1^I2^I3^I4$     
1^I2^I3^I4$ 

There is a lot of information out there about line endings, but I could not find a direct answer to explain these observations. Any help or direction to clarifying resources would be much appreciated.

Jeff

Answer 1

In the first case, Vim apparently doesn't properly detect the line endings. The sole use of CR (^M) is the (old) Mac-style. You can add mac to the 'fileformats' option, or explicitly specify the format when opening:

:edit ++ff=mac FILE.txt