Lists without a list indicator character?

Extensions
1

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
2

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).

3

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
4

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.

5

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

6

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
:::::::::::::::::