What does ^M character mean in Vim?

Question

I keep getting `^M` character in my vimrc and it breaks my configuration.

Answer 1

the "^M" character is probably a result of the file contents getting mangled when going between ms windows and some variant of unix (like mac os or gnu/linux).

on gnu/linux there's a tool called "dos2unix" to get rid of them. you would use it like this:

dos2unix ~/.vimrc

on macos, there's tr, which i think you can use like this:

tr -d '\r' < ~/.vimrc > ~/.vimrc

hope that helps!