Thought I’d check, and that’s true for MarkText too.
I assume it’s an attempt to offer both groups of users the keystrokes they are used to. I thought it would be confusing, but I suppose it isn’t. Few WP users would often switch to source mode. Not sure, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any complaints.
Discourse only providing heart reactions is 
FWIW, I would downvote this feature request.
I don’t use Obsidian as an editor any more; coders seem determined that it remain a code editor only.
But I have two workarounds, for those who are interested:
- Copy an Obsidian page (or any document or list with lines, where you really want paragraphs), paste into a word processor (Word does this perfectly, but it has worked 99% of the time in other word processors), then copy that page and paste back into the program you started with. Voilà! Lines are now paragraphs.
- Use a keyboard utility. I used Clavier+ to do this in another program. I set up Enter to produce Enter Enter when the Num Lock was set to off (usually I have it on, but it doesn’t matter anyway). Since I nearly always want a succession of one behaviour or the other, I don’t use the Num Lock very often, and I always have paragraphs when I want them.
Simple and effective.
Though neither is as good as programs that allow configuration.
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- “Strict line breaks” is already disabled by default which gives you a paragraph on line break in reading view and parity on live preview and reading (breaking markdown spec by the way; strict line breaks is one of the first things I toggle on).
- comparisons to outliners like roam and athens and markdown editors like Obsidian is apples and oranges. I’ve yet to use an editor that behaves as you are prescribing by default. This would be surprising behavior.
An aside, given the overwhelming enthusiasm for live preview, I’m not quite sure how a line break behavior default like this means coders are determined that [Obsidian] remain a code editor only. 
They’re not paragraphs. Still just lines. Markdown is strict in its definition of paragraphs.
As I pointed out above, there’s Typora and MarkText.
Roam etc are PKM apps as well as being outliners.
You can see the way that users switch between them - including Obsidian - that many are interesting in the PKM abilities rather than the outliner design.
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PLLLELEEEEAZE
I am both a coder and a writer. I want BOTH and I want both NOW.
I use many conventions in different contexts and for different uses. This is part of life. Get over it. Obsidian is already being used way beyond just plain markdown (Latex, for example), and all the different flavors of markdown have their own raison d’être, and many of them are ubiquitous enough that it behooves any text editor to support them.
Another example of arbitrary limitations is not using editing toolbars because it is distracting. Sure, for some, but for others they are a boon, or they wouldn’t be so ubiquitous. If you don’t like them, don’t use them. But banning them altogether is cutting off your nose to spite your face. (I have found a plugin for that though…in chinese!)
I would say the same for this.
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If you are a coder and a writer, try making a plug in that will do what you want. Remember Obsidian is still basically a beta program. There are a grand total of 3 programmers working on fixing bugs and adding new features. This is on a program that works across Microsoft Software, Apple Software (Mac OS, iOS), Android Software, and Most of the Flavors of Linux Software. Each of these all do the same thing in different ways. They are essentially magicians getting this to work. They have a defined roadmap they are following . The mods here are volunteers and bend over backwards to help our community, and they do an awesome job. This community is amazing.
Making demands make you sound like a toddler. Why don’t you hold your breath until they programmers do what you want and get down on the floor and kick and scream.
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Thanks. Points well taken. My tongue was very much in my cheek, but I appreciate the background, and I concur that they (those you mentioned) have done a great job, and it is daunting. The issue of whether it is easy or not is different from whether it is a good idea, and that is really what I was speaking to. I wanted to subvert the coder vs. non coder mentality. Admittedly I was playing the gladfly, but no disrespect was intended, and apologies if umbrage were to be taken. It wasn’t a demand, just a perspective, and really offered in the spirit of good will.
I think the way to resolve the “defaults” issue is to have a dialog on first open that asks whether the user wants Obsidian to behave more like a word processor or a code editor. This would change several settings, which could of course be changed independently. There would also be a “master switch” in settings which would change them all at once.
Ah, I posted this in Help today
and now I am finding this feature request, which is very close to what I had in mind.
One thing that was not mentioned here is that showing a complete blank line to separate paragraphs wastes a lot of screen space. Just look at any Obsidian note. This convention comes from the time of the 80x25 screen where you could only create vertical space between lines by creating an empty line. But just like the default Obsidian font is not a monospaced font to emulate the 80x25 screen, I don’t see any reason to show us a full blank line between paragraphs now.
No, this convention is from HTML and the markdown spec.
I would love to see a plugin adding this feature.
Coming from both heavy programming and writing (game dev docs) background, I am hoping to use Obsidian rather than a few programs put together for the docs we need.
Thank you for the software though, as it is, it’s really good.
Correct you are!
Furthermore, the convention allows us to apply Robert Lin’s Semantic line breaks, a minimal version of Mattt’s Semantic Line Breaks (sembr.org).
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Thank you, I’ll take a look.
+1
This would be pretty nice, not having to press enter twice for a new paragraph. I think this is also how it works on mobile.
Coming from Roam Reasearch, I was very pleased to see how smooth, elegant, logical and user friendly everything in Obsidian works. Therefore, I can hardly believe that such a basic feature as creating a line break within a paragraph is not present. This is standard in any editor I used for the last 40 years, and I don’t see any reason for not implementing it the same way in Obsidian (at least as an option to be activated in the settings).
Have you adjusted the strict line breaks setting?
I’ve tried this setting, yes, but it does not address what I am talking about.
Let me explain this with some HTML code:
<p>This is text in the first paragraph.<br />
This is text in the same paragraph, but after a hard line break.</p>
<p>This is text in the second paragraph.</p>
So basically I would like to create the equivalent of a <br /> with SHIFT+RETURN. Maybe that’s not how markup works, but it’s how any word processor works.
For line break:
- With strict line break disabled, just
<enter>. - With strict line break enabled, use
<space><space><enter>. That’s how markdown does it.
This is off topic in this thread. If you need further help open a new thread in the help section.
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