Broken numbered nested lists in version 1.8.9

Help
1

Steps to reproduce

1. first item
2. second item, has children:
   1. first nested item
   2. second nested item
3. third item

Did you follow the troubleshooting guide? [Y/N]

Y

Expected result

This type of numbered list, which uses 3 spaces for nested items, following Obsidian’s own guidelines, used to work correctly, keeping the numbers like they are seen in the example.

Actual result

After version 1.8.9, this list is not detected as having nested items by Obsidian, and so the list gets transformed into this:

1. first item
2. second item, has children:
   3. first nested item
   4. second nested item
5. third item

Strangely, using 4 spaces makes it work (like it would in Commonmark markdown), but 3 spaces should work too (like it did in previous Obsidian versions and in Github Flavoured Markdown).

Environment

SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: v1.8.9
Installer version: v1.6.7
Operating system: Windows 10 Home 10.0.19045
Login status: not logged in
Language: en
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: dark
Community theme: Prism v3.5.3
Snippets enabled: 0
Restricted mode: off
Plugins installed: 5
Plugins enabled: 4
1: Excalidraw v2.7.4
2: Style Settings v1.0.9
3: PlantUML v1.8.0
4: Kanban v2.0.51

RECOMMENDATIONS:
Custom theme and snippets: for cosmetic issues, please first try updating your theme and disabling your snippets. If still not fixed, please try to make the issue happen in the Sandbox Vault or disable community theme and snippets.
Community plugins: for bugs, please first try updating all your plugins to latest. If still not fixed, please try to make the issue happen in the Sandbox Vault or disable community plugins.

Additional information

I suspect this was a consequence of an improvement of the 1.8.9 version (from the changelog):

List auto-numbering now preserves custom starting numbers

I’ve tested this in sandbox mode too, and the problem is still there.

2

We currently only support 4 spaces or 1 tab. We have become a bit more strict in the 1.8.x release about it.

3

Hmm… given that those two posts are about custom tab expansion length and custom indentation guide size, can this post be converted to a feature request about delimiter based indentation for nested lists or should I create a new one?

By the way, respectfully, it’s a weird choice to disable delimiter based indentation support while your own documentation’s examples use that type of indentation (see the “Nesting lists” header in the “syntax” page of the help subdomain of this website).
Users like me, that followed those guidelines, will suddenly find themselves with lots of broken files (indeed, editing a nested numbered list with delimiter based indentation created in previous versions, completely breaks it, adding random periods and changing all the numbers).

4

We didn’t disable “delimiter based indentation”, we never supported it.
What we disabled is the ability for tab keypress to be converted to anything different than 4 spaces because we do not support “delimiter based indentation” and problems around it were piling up.

I don’t think you need to create another FR, because your problem falls within that category.

Side-note: You can disable “smart lists” in the settings and the automatic numbering feature that was introduced in 1.8.x will not come into play.

1 Like
5

Thanks for the last tip, it works and it get displayed correctly even in read mode.

1 Like