Polish logic for bullet list

Feature requests
1

Right now when using bullet lists, you can click “enter” to get a new bullet list, that’s good.
But when you want to write some note(see below)

* point 1
   Here is the note!

you need to first delete auto-generated "* " and then press several “space bar” to write content inside bullet list. And when you want to write a new bullet list , you need to delete several space bar and then press "* "to get bullet list.
Obviously it’s annoying to do so again and again. I think we can learn from typora: when you press “enter” in bullet list, you get a new bullet list. If then you press “enter” you can now write content inside that bullet list. If you press “delete” instead of “enter”, now you “escaped” from that bullet list.That logic is simple and easier to understand

2 Likes
2

First, I suggest using - or + for bullets instead of *
They don’t have any conflicting styles to navigate. * generates markdown to italicize.

Second, use Ctrl-[ and Ctrl-] to out-dent and indent for correct bullet positions. It saves a lot of space keys.

Third, I’ve noticed that simply pressing backspace twice on a new list line removes the bullet and preserves the line as part of the bullet item above. Add as many new lines as you like and simply resume bullets with your preferred markdown when ready. No extra spaces or line shifting needed.

That might suffice for you. But I do agree that it would be nice to smooth out adding information text under any bullet. Most editors I’ve encountered accept Shift-Enter to accomplish this. I would like to see obsidian incorporate Shift-Enter into its UI.

To be clear:

  1. Starting with an ordered or unordered list…
  2. Pressing Shift-Enter would start a new line that is indented to match the text in the bulleted line above, but not be bulleted. We can Shift-Enter as many times as we need to add more text as part of the above bullet.
  3. The next time Enter is pressed without a modifier key, ordered or unordered listing resumes as it was.

I prefer this workflow and would like to see it in Obsidian. But I can retrain to manually remove and add bullet markdown. It’s less efficient but not terrible.

2 Likes
3

thank you for your suggestion！ especially ctrl-[ and ctrl-]. At least I don’t need to calculate how much space bar do I need right now.
But I find out that in Obsidian, after pressing ctrl-[, it will indent with one space, so in edit mode, these two lines do not look aligned(but in preview they do). Is it feature or bug?

4

I find that to be a little disorienting as well. I wish the markdown edit space presented better. And maybe it’s possible to adjust some CSS to make it show more clearly. But I presume that we won’t have to think about it much once WYSIWYG is implemented.

1 Like