Pressing Enter in an empty nested line should move to a new line at the same nesting level, rather than reducing the nesting level of the current line

Problem

Currently, when you press Enter on an empty nested line, instead of moving to a new line at the same indentation level, the indentation is removed.
In other words, on an empty indented line, Enter stops performing its usual function of moving (creating) to a new line and instead begins to perform the same function as the Shift + Tab key combination.

To move to a new line on an empty nested line, you have to use Shift + Enter, but as soon as you use Shift + Enter, another problem arises: the new line becomes Code rather than plain text.

All of this is compounded by some (subjective) total confusion in the logic of Paragraphs & Line Breaks in Obsidian, which seems unnecessarily complicated and unintuitive.

Also, LLMs use a formatting style where bullet lists are separated by blank nested lines, which makes working with and editing their responses simply inconvenient given the behavior described above.

Proposed solution

I suggest adding the option to change this behavior so that pressing Enter on an empty nested line creates a new line at the same nesting level.
In other words, Enter should perform its usual function rather than perform the Shift + Tab function when used on an empty nested line.

If the Enter key is pressed on an empty nested bullet(/number/checkbox) list, two possible behaviors can be implemented:

  1. The original bullet list remains unchanged, and a new bullet list is created on a new line with the same indentation level – more intuitive logic, but you may need to manually delete the first/previous bullet list
  2. The first/previous bullet list is deleted, but the indentation level of its line remains the same, and a new bullet list is created on a new line with the same indentation level – less intuitive logic, but will be convenient when working with formatting like messages from an LLM

Perhaps I’m not understanding something, and the current behavior has a valid reason behind it – and some people find it convenient – so I suggest implementing this as an option in the settings that users can enable or disable based on their personal preferences, needs, and habits.

Current workaround

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Related feature requests

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