Bring back smarter ordered list numbering?

FoldingText 1.x tried to be smart about automatically updating ordered lists numbers. For example if you inserted/removed an ordered list item then the rest of the list would get renumbered. Or if you indented an existing list item into a list of a different type (ordered/unordered) then its type would be updated to match surrounding items.

Neat feature, but somewhat complicated to implement and had some buggy edge cases. When rewriting everything it never got added to the 2.0 codebase and I forgot about it. But I was just reminded and want to know if lots of people used it and want it back? Is it worth the extra complexity and “magic”? Any other plain text editors that have a good solution for this sort of thing?

Just checked on SublimeText (in markdown mode — with a dedicated plugin) and it’s not implemented.

I think that it’s nice to have the automatic renumbering, but to be honest I don’t use it a lot… I didn’t even realize it was missing in the 2.0 version (which I use for some time)!

I have it with google doc (which is not plain text, I know) and I have to hack it half of the time because it does what I don’t want :expressionless:

The real question (for me) is: will the generated numbers be the same whatever the markdown generated I use to transform my FT doc into HTML? If not, it might be misleading and annoying to have automatic renumbering of complex structure that does not match the generated version.

In conclusion, I vote no :slight_smile:

I think smart numbered-list handling would be a good long-term feature; i.e. not something that needs to be implemented immediately, but certainly seems to fit the feel of the app.

Thumbs up for smart list numbering

Not something I noticed in 1 but would be a nice to have though I don’t tend to move stuff around that much so I always did it manually before

I vote to bring back smart ordered list numbering.

While we are at it, I’d love for the ordered list to work more like SublimeText’s Github Markdown plugin. The bullet character changes with each level of indentation. For example:

- Dash
    + Plus
        * Asterisk
            - Dash
                + Plus
                    * Asterisk

Here’s a manual way to do list renumbering in version 2.0. Create an ordered list like this:

1. one
1. two
1. three

Select it. And then do Format > Lists > Ordered List

That will correct the list numbering. I think a next step might be to make that command work without having to select the entire list. So the logic would be:

If formatOrderedList command and selection is collapsed and current item is a list item. Then instead of only formatting the current item, find all of it’s sibling list items and format them together. Does that seems reasonable?

That and a command to reorder the list by the changed numbers. Thay way, if I change the ordered list number, I can select the command and it will reorder the list.

Make both of those a command option that will just work on the list the cursor is in would be nice.

Also, automatically fixing the items number upon changing level would be nice. That is the only thing I do not like about auto-numbering. I hit enter, then tab to increase the indent to a new level and I have to fix the number.

I totally support a smarter ordered list. FoldingText is about managing text and lists so a better numbering (and renumbering) on the fly would make the software more usable by itself.