Ubuntu – Vim: Move left at the beginning of a line should go to above line

For gEdit there does not seem to be a way to disable having a newline inserted at the end see this answer.

For Vim (and gVim ) you can - by executing the following option: :set binary. Setting to binary will save the file as is and not insert a newline at the end of the document (Unless there already is one, in which it will be retained). At anytime you can revert this option with :set nobinary.

Nano is a little easier. You can launch nano with the -L flag (or --nonewlines if you're more the visual type). This will disable the automatic addition of the newline to the end of the file (so long as one was not actually entered). Ideally you could setup this alias in your ~/.bashrc: alias nano="nano -L", which would launch Nano with the no newlines flag included in it!

Since I don't know exactly what you're doing I'm going to point you to Why should files end with a newline? which may explain why they're there. In short some applications will fail if they don't find an EOL directly before the EOF

For gnome-terminal, add this to your ~/.vimrc (to be created if missing):

if has("autocmd")
  au InsertEnter * silent execute "!gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_shape ibeam"
  au InsertLeave * silent execute "!gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_shape block"
  au VimLeave * silent execute "!gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_shape ibeam"
endif

Found here: Change cursor shape in different modes.

EDIT

Change the last ibeam to block, to leave with a block cursor.