Licat (and all) - I’ve reached a point where I have scrubbed out whatever condition causes the bug. Can’t ultimately point to the cause, but the good news is that I’ve found a workaround.
I’ll include the steps below, but the BLUF is that I had some caused by having both an iPad and iPhone use the same .obsidian config folder in an Obsidian synced folder. Programatically, it feels like a race condition in sync might be causing the intermittent nature, although the idea that it would cause a new pane on a new line seems admittedly far fetched. But step through the details below, and it begins to sound at least defensible.
Now the details of what I did to attempt to diagnose and ultimately fix it (of which I suspect only the last step is needed in the case that anyone else encounters this issue):
- In addition to previous thread comments, I did confirm that there were no global keybindings. I do use Autohotkey, but did unload it with no change in the bug occurance.
- No auto-complete or text expanders or keyboard macros - except iOS keyboard expansions - none of which would even remotely cause the issue
- Next, I tried to characterize better which newlines were triggering the new doc. Failure rate was about 50% of the time, but inconsistent. Sometimes between two empty lines. Sometimes at the end of a paragraph. Hitting two carriage returns in quick succession exacerbated the condition to have almost 100% error rate, but that could just be multiplication of the 50% chance.
- Creating a new vault (local) made the problem entirely disappear. Woohoo.
- Returning to the Obsidian Sync’d vault made the problem remanifest itself on both iPhone and iPad. This suggests that the source of the bug is somehow stored in the .obsidian config files. Note, though, that I also sync to a PC with that configuration and the PC does not show the problem.
- Issue persists over full resets of the app - and the most reset app upgrade.
- Issue also persists even in plugin safe mode, so it is not plugin related.
- I went through every configuration setting and matched every setting on the iPhone, iPad and PC. Problem persisted on iPad and iPhone despite identical settings.
- Now it gets interesting - Knowing that it had to be something in the .obsidian folder that is shared by all three devices, I decided to have the iPhone configuration override the config folder location (.obsidian-iphone). In so doing it created a new config for the iPhone.
Upon relaunch, immediately the bug disappeared (!). And not only that, the bug disappeared on both the iPad AND the iPhone - hence the race condition idea.
To confirm it wasn’t an errant setting, I reset the now default settings on the iPhone to be the same as the iPad - and still the bug was gone. So it wasn’t a specific non-default setting.
Finally, I reset the config folder back to the shared .obsidian default folder, and voila, bug was instantly back. Switching the iphone back to its own .obsidian-iphone folder and again, problem solved - no more new notes when hitting return.
So… conclusion:
A) I have a working solution - have my shared iPad and iPhone use different obsidian folder locations. One can be the same as a PC, but not both.
B) Implication is that something in the .obsidian folder structure, but outside of settings and plugins, is causing an issue between iPad and iPhone.
C) Assuming B), then the sync json may be the issue, as it is one of the few things actively modified as one types.
D) The relatively rarity of the bug may be because I am one of the few using both iPhone and iPad (and potentially PC).
From here, I’m happy as a clam. I’m happy to help debug further, having a config that can manifest the bug quickly when needed. But otherwise, happy to call this issue closed - and leave all the details up for any future users that encounter it.
@Licat - if you’ve made it this far I hope this helps. Thanks for all the hard work. Truly amazing work.
– z2K (aka truth)