FR: Option for Line Break at Document End to ignore empty files

[jose-elias-alvarez]

Is Your Feature Request Related to a Problem? Please Describe.

I use the Line Break at Document End option, but I find its behavior annoying in one specific case: when linting an empty file, it adds a new line, meaning that the file is no longer empty. I lint files on document save and on focused file change, so this means that whenever I edit an empty file, even for a second, it ends up containing a single line break.

The current behavior is consistent with the rule description, but apart from the annoyance of having to remove the line when I don't want it, it's also convenient to keep empty files truly empty, since it makes it easy to find them by querying the file system (or Dataview) for files that are 0B in size.

To replicate: enable the Line Break at Document End option, create an empty note, lint it, then check its file size:

ls -lh empty.md | awk '{print $5}' # 1B

Describe the Solution You'd Like

An option to disable the rule on empty files. (Since the option is a toggle, I don't know if a new option would have to be added or if the existing rule can be adapted.)

I’m happy to put in a PR if there’s agreement on a direction.

Describe Alternatives You've Considered

I can of course tweak my search to instead find files that are 1 byte in size, but that's less convenient, inconsistent with other methods of finding empty files, and could also lead to false positives.

I could also disable the specific setting and / or only lint on demand, but this setup works as I want 99% of the time, so that would not be ideal, either.

Additional Context

For comparison, formatters such as Prettier do not add a line break to empty files:

touch empty.js && prettier --log-level=silent --write empty.js && ls -lh empty.js | awk '{print $5}' # 0B

(Also, apologies if there's already an issue about this – it's very hard to search given the sheer number of open issues and the fact that many issues contain debug output.)

[pjkaufman]

Hey @jose-elias-alvarez , thanks for the feedback. I am thinking that this should be fine to integrate into the logic of the existing rule. I was originally thinking that it should be a separate option to prevent a change in user space, but this seems like an edge case where people would not want this to happen. If they do want this to happen, I can see about adding an option to do so down the road.

[pjkaufman]

I have a fix for this that is ready to go. I will see about making a PR and getting it merged.

[pjkaufman]

The change for this should be on master and go out in the next release. Please let us know if there are issues with it.

[jose-elias-alvarez]

Awesome, thanks @pjkaufman!