Please, oh Vim gurus, explain this binary/noeol situation. It seems to me that if I open a text file in e.g. metapad or Edit Plus or any of these other very simple Windows-based text editors, I am able to delete the "final line break," which appears on screen as though there is a zero-length line right after the last line of text. I press backspace on that empty line and it is gone; so is the EOL.

In order to achieve this in Vim, I must perform strange acrobatics including turning on "binary," which clobbers my textwidth, wrapmargin, expandtab, and modeline options, and forces unix-like line separators.

My only guess is that Vim follows certain established rules for the formatting of proper text files, but I have run across situations where I need to edit text files (AS text files) that have no final EOL, and it pains me that Vim makes this harder than such functionally limited editors as Edit Plus.

Is there some Better Way?