Intelligent Pasting of Lists / Remove extra marker

[ddulic]

Would be cool if Obsidian is somehow able to intelegently detect and modify a paste action. Currently if I have

- [ ] Ticket: PRD External Ingress

And I want to copy it and modify one sections, it looks like

- [ ] Ticket: PRD External Ingress
- [ ] - [ ] Ticket: PRD External Ingress

Would be nice if the - [ ] is excluded somehow if it is detected so it doesn’t duplicate.

[ryanjamurphy]

Edited the title with more description. Thanks!

[philfreo]

Steps to reproduce

I frequently find my self trying to cut/paste a list item from one place to another and I often end up with a duplicate dash. I wish Obsidian would be smarter upon paste in a scenario like this, like some other editors are.

Environment

• Operating system: macOS

• Obsidian version: 0.9.11

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Additional information

[philfreo]

Here’s another use case that I often hit with the same issue:

[malecjan]

Automatically remove automatically added list-item prefix when appropriate

Use case or problem

• place caret in line which starts by string "- " (dash, space), optionally preceded by indentation
• Cut a line “1” using Ctrl+X
• place cursor to end of another line “2” which also starts by "- " (optionally preceded by indentation)
• press Enter. Now "- " is added to new line, that is OK.
• press Ctrl+V to paste the line “1”. Now line starts by "- - "
• I have to navigate to the line beginning and delete the automatically added "- "

Proposed solution

• I would prefer automatically added "- " to be removed automatically when pasted content starts by "- " followed by standard text (e.g. alphanumeric character), i.e. pasted text matches markdown list item syntax.

• Similar situation occurs when caret is at the end of line and delete is pressed. Fixing it by pressing Enter (immediately or later) leads again to "- - ".

  • When curent line starts by string "- " (dash, space), preceded by optional indentation and at the same time caret is followed by "- " and Enter is pressed, then editor should not add another "- " automatically.

Related Feature Requests

• Easier ("intelligent") mouse control when marking text (linking, ...)

keywords: double, duplicate, hyphen, list item, minus, new line, paste

[I-d-as]

Glad to see this. Somehow I missed it when I made a similar request here: Automatic avoidance of extra bracket set in checkbox formatting

Thanks.

[DDDOH]

Also when using list of multiple levels, pasting behavior now can de a disaster. For example, I want to copy the selected content as shown below:

And I paste them directly to a non-list paragraph, it shows like

I have to make adjustment manually (which could be really difficult for some list with more levels inside)

I know that if I add the bullet point before the selection would work, but is it possible to have a more elegant way?

[hxnry]

i very much agree! I created a different request with exactly that issue. This issue particularly harms users copying/pasting from Obsidian into other apps which are essential workplace tools – I’m hoping it can be resolved

link to my request: Copying lists in Obsidian should behave similar to Logseq/Roam (no extra spaces)

[nerl]

Use case or problem

When copying Task items from one block of text to another, a duplicate - [ ] is created when making a new line after an existing Task. This happens a lot when copying blocks of tasks around.

2026-05-07_10-35-54.zip (54.0 KB)

(Had to attach as a ZIP as the forum wouldn’t allow video uploads)

Proposed solution

Obsidian should remove the duplicate - [ ] that is automatically created. See the video for the steps to reproduce.

Current workaround (optional)

Manually formatting, or creating a rule that would auto delete duplicate - [ ] task formatting. This is a clunky workaround though. Thank you!