ne's manual

4.9.2: Binary

document is performed in a different way. On loading, only nulls are considered newlines; on saving, nulls are saved instead of newlines. This allows you to edit a binary file, fix some text in it, and save it without modifying anything else. Normally, linefeeds, carriage returns and nulls are considered newlines, so that what you load will have all nulls and carriage returns substituted by newlines when saved.

Note that since usually binary files contain a great number of nulls, and every null will be considered a line terminator, the memory necessary for loading a binary file can be several times bigger than the length of the file. Thus, binary editing within ne should be considered not a normal, but rather an exceptional activity.

If you call this command with no arguments, it will toggle the flag. If you specify 0 or 1, the flag will be set to false or true, respectively. An upper case `B' will appear on the status bar if the flag is true.