Is there a way to disable the automatic indenting that happens when you type * , with either a global document setting or with a note-specific attribute?
Thatās a quicklist, and itās a convenient way to write unordered lists for export to HTML.
If you donāt want the indent, set $QuickListIndent and $QuickListHangingIndent to 0.
If you donāt want the indent anywhere in a document, set the default values of $QuickListIndent and $QuickListHangingIndent to 0.
Thank you!
Also, if a note uses the built-in Markdown prototype this is taken care of.
^^ Iām left wondering why anyone would type ā*ā atthe beginning of a line and not expect a list, My hunch is the new influx of those who know no different than the rather recent arrival of Markdown-centric tools. N crime there , but Tinderbox was invented way before Markdown so it is naive to assume Tinderboxās defaultās to Markdown notions. Bottom line: check oneās casual assumptions about norms. Village Aās norms may not be those of village B, not matter how annoying this is for citizens of village B.
This isnāt a critique of Markdown-centric folk, but flagging the cost of lazy assumptions about what everyone does. To my reading, Tinderbox\s defaults are cromulent. It is up to Markdown-centric users to use the available settings to accommodate their abnormal default expectations.
There is no "make this app assume Markdown is normal"setting but it is very easy to make a customised doc in your App Settings/Tinderbox/favorites folder to accommodate his non-normative assumption.
In this case, my Markdown prototype didnāt have 0 values for those quicklist attributes. I donāt know why ā Iām sure I used the built-in prototype ā but itās an old document and Iāve lost track of everything that Iāve done with it over the years.
Fixed now.
Iām one of those āanyonesā! I wanted italics in a line, not a list.
Markdown generally distinguishes between * firstword and *firstword.
But (helpfully in many situations) Tinderbox by default assumes a list and indents immediately without waiting to see if there is a space after the first *. Once there, the indent it seems cannot be removed in the editor, at least not easily.
Easy to control by setting the prototype to Markdown or changing values in $QuickListIndent and $QuickListHangingIndent.
(But of course you have to know where to look.)
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I feel that is rather judgemental ā I donāt think you have to be a psychologist to realise that we base much of what we do on assumptions, which are often based on learned experience. Iāve been using Macs since 1993 and it would never have occurred to me that typing * at the beginning of a line would automatically create an unordered list. It doesnāt do that in TextEdit, which I have just tried. Anyway, I have learned something new ā¦
Judgemental? Politely, I beg to differ on the characterisation of my use of the word ālazyā as being judgemental.
Perhaps from a psychologistās perspective, but such people are looking for possible conflict. But, to the person with a hammer, everything is a nail. So, respectfully, I think you misread the meaning here is ālazyā. I use the word in the sense of thinks we do with minimal effort and little thought as due to a different assumptionāwe are normal so other peoplesā norms are the same as oursāwe donāt stop to questioner assumptions.
After near four decades as an information āemergency plumberā Iām used to looking for these ālazyā assumptions under the informational wreckage. This missteps were not deliberateāwe are 'judgingābut there were ill-considered.
If we all hide behind the comfort of not confronting our misstepsāinnocent or notāit is hard to learn and avoid repetition of sub-par choices.
Paring back, Tinderboxās list generation works as described. The fact this does not match the norms of some users is not a bug or error, it is a case of stopping to consider mis-matched assumptions. In a utility, that just does one thing, it is fair to argue about defaults as there tends to be little flex from that. In a toolbox serving many different sets of norms, then it is likely that for all of us some of the defaults will be āwrongāāfor us, but not everybody. I guess it is partly a generational perspective shift from āwhat works for mostā to āwhat works for meā.
Anyway, @sumnerg has helpfully answered my confusing and as helpfully given the simple answer. On the side, Iāve made a note to see if this issue (auto-lists) might be better cross-referenced in aTbRef.
On the psychology side, Iād note interesting learning from (trying to) work with Claude AI (other brand are availableā¦). After much to any from (weeks of failed experiments) Iāve finally managed to get it to āreadā aTbRef. Whilst āusefullyāit has found some mismatched records of default settings, it has failed completely in helping understand the corpus, its structure, and whether there are inconsistencies/errors. Why? In short, it canāt think, in the way humans do. Sure, if info is in the LLM or RAG, it has a probabilistic frame for elegant text synthesisāwhich gives the appearance of understanding when output. But, it doesnāt actually understand the texture of the knowledge, unless the training data already contains a description of the understanding. As it will admit is asked, it canāt spin multiple plates at once as (some) humans can allowing multiple discrete but connected contexts.
The latter I find to be a key need in discovery work. Claude is, especially if working outside a group setting, an interesting sounding board and reflection mechanism as long as you remember the intelligent part of the system ā¦ is you. It can, in the blink of an eye, code something that might take me days or weeks, yet it canāt understand if its output actually works. It does give pause for thought about āagenticā work: garbage in, garbage out, and at a speed no human can match. Very much the curateās egg.
Speaking of the eggs of curates who go On lissom, clerical, printless toe, let us remember that
ā¦ folks in Shelford and those parts Have twisted lips and twisted hearts, And Barton men make Cockney rhymes, And Cotonās full of nameless crimes, And things are done youād not believe At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
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Iāve lived in Cambridge most of my life, but I donāt know how much understanding I can claim.
I donāt think the notion is a macOS (or OS X, or Mac OS) one. Tinderbox has used āquick listsā since at least v2.2.0 (release note $seq = 619) of 26 Apr 2004 (see early aTbRef), and appears to have been added to aid HTML export of listsāblogging was an early intended use of Tinderboxā .
The uptick in Markdown adoption in the late 2010āin forum software (Discourse, here, uses Markdown in drafting posts), noting tools, etcādoubtless added to a common notion that lines starting with an asterisk+space * indicated the intent of rendering an unordered/bulleted list.
Infuriating as it may be for Markdown adherents, Tinderbox predates Markdown, so does not have the sort of Markdown-centric design seen (copied!) in many current noting tools. This is why there is a Markdown built-in prototype to assist those who want to simulate a Markdown-centric noting experience (and for export, etc.). It is a challenge for the developer as there are other groups of users whoāfor instanceānever touch export, donāt want HTML or Markdown in their work and like to work in styled text as you might see in TextEdit or Word. One-size-fits-all is a hard balancing act!
ā . Interestingly, John Gruberās Markdown (designed with Aaron Swartz) dates from late 2004 so Iād not be surprised if there were developer conversations around markup for lists at that time. I donāt know more as I didnāt start using Tinderbox until late 2004 (using v2.3.4).
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lines starting with an asterisk *
should read
lines starting with an asterisk followed by a space *
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In my case Iāve never used an asterisk at the start of a line for a list. Iāve always used a dash, but I donāt know why. I find myself wondering if this goes back to typewriters (yes, Iām old enough to have started with those).
Edit: Iāve just had a look at a picture of a manual typewriter keyboard and I see that dash and asterisk are on the same key, but asterisk requires shift. Iām sure I was lazy enough to skip the shift ā¦
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Also, quote a lost of apps/scripts that allow listing of this type allow a bullet (ā¢) instead of an asterisk. But, there is no dedicated key for bullets, so an asterisk stands proxy.
FWIW, on Mac keyboards, Option+8) (ā„+8) generates a bullet, like so: ā¢.
ā¢ Markdown (or the flavour used by discounts does not support this it ā¦
- ā¦ still needs a line-starting
*to auto-generated a bulleted list. White space before the asterisk ā¦- indents the bullet (IIRC, spaces per level). This bullet has 4 leading spaces ā¦
- ā¦ this one has four leading spaces, etc.
- indents the bullet (IIRC, spaces per level). This bullet has 4 leading spaces ā¦
Note: Markdown, though widely used, has no formalised standard. Thus, different āflavoursā of the concept may effect some output features via different code, and not all features are available in all flavours. So, test assumptions about feature support.
A dash followed by a space - or a plus followed by a space + at the beginning of a line also start an unordered list in most (all?) flavors of Markdown. As you note the dash is the most economical to type. Wonder why the others caught on. Probably somebody just thought they looked better.
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