Why does Git treat this text file as a binary file

Question

I wonder why git tells me this:?

$ git diff MyFile.txt
diff --git a/MyFile.txt b/MyFile.txt
index d41a4f3..15dcfa2 100644
Binary files a/MyFile.txt and b/MyFile.txt differ

Aren't they text files?

I have checked the .gitattributes and it is empty. Why I am getting this message? I cannot get diffs as I use to anymore

ADDED:

I've noticed there is an @ in the file permissions, what is this? Could this be the reason?

$ls -all
drwxr-xr-x   5 nacho4d  staff    170 28 Jul 17:07 .
drwxr-xr-x  16 nacho4d  staff    544 28 Jul 16:39 ..
-rw-r--r--@  1 nacho4d  staff   6148 28 Jul 16:15 .DS_Store
-rw-r--r--@  1 nacho4d  staff    746 28 Jul 17:07 MyFile.txt
-rw-r--r--   1 nacho4d  staff  22538  5 Apr 16:18 OtherFile.txt

Answer 1

I had an instance where .gitignore contained a double \r (carriage return) sequence by purpose.

That file was identified as binary by git. Adding a .gitattributes file helped.

# .gitattributes file
.gitignore diff