Lists without a list indicator character?

Hi,

Also I am not a programmer (but an interaction designer), and I came here because I miss a (non-programmer?) feature.

My use case:

The way I use Markdown is mostly to take notes that often contain lists. The thing I currently don’t like about Markdown lists is the way they force you to indicate that you are working on a list for every line of that list. I am forced to write a * or whatever followed by a space. I would like a list type that omitted this, e.g.:

pineapples
oranges
raspberries

And have it look like this:

  • pineapples
  • oranges
  • raspberries

I understand that some preceding markup is probably neccessary, or else the required intelligence will probably yield undesired results. In any case, this is a need that Gruber’s original “spec” doesn’t solve. Has it been discussed here? Couldn’t see it in the 0.6 spec at least.

Having said that: love that you respect line breaks.

3 Likes

Welcome @bjornte. There has been extensive discussion about how line breaks should work in the default line break handling is inconvenient topic. I find - to be the most convenient list marker as it does not require the use of the shift key, unlike + and *. Without a list marker it would be difficult to determine if the item on the new line should be part of the same list. Perhaps a case could be made for defining list blocks with no markers (as an extension).

It sounds a bit too hard to simply assume a list of words to be a list. But perhaps it can be contextually detected via this form. Where we detect the presence of : in headers (don’t think it’s used much for headers so minimal collision hopefully) e.g. :

Food List:
----------
pineapples
oranges
raspberries

or

## Food List:
pineapples
oranges
raspberries
1 Like

How about fencing them with minuses? That seems obvious since minuses are most-commonly used to represent the bullets.

# Food List

---
pineapples
oranges
raspberries
---

This would collide with horizontal rules but they could be required to be surrounded by blank lines like paragraphs.

I would not do that, it is a totally confusing special-casing without some syntax.

If there is honestly, no suitable way to support this. Then we can brute force it using block generic directives (using my concept of one)

Quick and dirty:

!list:
pineapples
oranges
raspberries

Bit more maintainable:

!list: numerical
:::::::::::::::::
pineapples
oranges
raspberries
:::::::::::::::::