CLI text editor recommendation

[Andy Greenwood]

I need a CLI text editor I can use over ssh, which does NOT append
newlines to the end of files as I save them. I am using this to edit
PHP files, and my PHP doesn't like newlines outside the last ?>. ee
and vi both do so, I tried nano which also does the same. I haven't
installed emacs to try that yet, since the man page says that it also
does the same thing. Does anyone have any ideas?

Another question: Why do so many text editors have this behavior?
Should a text editor really add text that I don't tell it to add to my
file? It seems that there must be some reason.