Make the cursor stop at the last character of a line instead of the newline character

Question

How to make cursor stop at the last character of a line instead of at the linefeed character? I use evil-mode.

Steps to reproduce the issue:

• Start Emacs in shell via emacs -nw -Q.
• Press C-e to move focus to the end of the line.
• You can see the yellow cursor stops at the linefeed character instead of the { character.

UPDATE: Thanks guys. It turns out it's not a bug but just default behavior of Emacs.

My issue is actually I'm using evil-mode and I mistakenly turn off a useful feature of evil.

Here is the CORRECT setup code to turn that flag on in evil-mode:

(setq evil-move-cursor-back t)

Answer 1

_{(This is too long for a comment, and while not literally an answer, I hope it might help the OP.)}

While Drew's answer covers what you literally want, this is probably not what you need. Point in Emacs is never on a character, it is between characters:

Like other positions, point designates a place between two characters (or before the first character, or after the last character), rather than a particular character. Usually terminals display the cursor over the character that immediately follows point; point is actually before the character on which the cursor sits.

Of course, both the display and some commands might mislead you. For instance, what-cursor-position

shows information about the current cursor position and the buffer contents at that position [...] After Char:, this shows the character in the buffer at point.

I am not sure whether the wording "at that position" and "at point" in this excerpt are bugs in the manual or not; I would consider reporting them with e.g. M-x report-emacs-bug.

Answer 2

Bind C-e to a command that puts the cursor one char to the left of the line end.

(defun foo (arg)
  (interactive "p")
  (end-of-line arg)
  (unless (bolp) (backward-char)))

(global-set-key "\C-e" 'foo)

(Although I cannot imagine why you would want to move the cursor there.)