The second paragraph starting “Another way to navigate” I indented the first line with tab and the whole paragraph is treated as a code block.
After the list there is another paragraph of text, also starting with “Another way to navigate” which I also indented the first line with tab and the whole paragraph is treated as list.
Even after adding line breaks, the text below is still treated as a list (or at least until I add text between the list and the indented paragraph):
i.e. list item can contain multiple lines if subsequent lines are intended by 4 spaces (if list marker is 123. then you need 8 spaces). In addition empty lines don’t need the said indentation.
I think @harr can give answer for you. He has contributed markdown related discussions here recently. I personally don’t view your example as inconsistent editor behavior.
In Obsidian one frequent source of confusion is Live Preview, because it hides some of the Markdown logic in the name of convenience. Live Preview works well for very simple text, but it is known to have problems with lists. I find working with Source mode and Reading view easier, when I don’t understand some of Markdown’s idiosyncracies.
My guess is, that the source code in the first example looks like this:
As you've seen …
Another way…
1. Open …
2. In the right:
3. Under **Linked mentions**, click …
Another way
1. In the top-right …
2. Select …
3. Click any …
This is a perfectly standard compliant rendering of the Markdown code. Obsidian does exactly, what it is supposed to do.
What is going on here? Your examples are about Markdown lists.
Your first example contains a bullet list with six items, where the third bullet has multiple lines.
Your second example contains a bullet list with three items followed by regular text starting with x. The indented line after the x is treated as code block, because it follows a regular line and not a list item.
(For more details see the specs links above.)
That a single character can change the formatting is the very essence of Markdown!
This makes Markdown so extremely efficient at marking up text. It require just two characters (- ) to start a bullet list. It requires only three characters (## ) to markup a level two headings.
Obsidian is an excellent Markdown editor, because (at least in Reading view) it applies Markdown specs very accurately.
Thank you very much for the excellent explanation. At least you’ve made it make sense, even though I still don’t like the logic of it.
Your tip about using ‘source mode’ is noted.
Somewhat irrelevant:
I may have been somewhat confused by the fact that there seems to something broken when opening Sandbox: if opened from them main Obsidian popup changes are not saved, but if you open Sandbox from the vault switcher (which I did, several times), changes are indeed saved even though is states that they are not. I wrote that “Screenshot from test in sandbox.” with the idea of having something free from anything I had messed with. I actually thought that “Border” was the new standard theme in sandbox, because it opened with that.
Also it probably didn’t help that the numbering of lists in Sandbox are wrong in edit view:
I agree with your points on Sandbox and Live Preview.
I’d also expect Sandbox to reset when it’s closed.
I’d also wish Live Preview would do a better job at actually previewing Markdown live. In this case I’d also expect the numbers to look like rendered Markdown (1 to 6) instead of some arbitrary place holder.
Looks like feature requests waiting to be written.
I may have been somewhat confused by the fact that there seems to something broken when opening Sandbox: if opened from them main Obsidian popup changes are not saved, but if you open Sandbox from the vault switcher
