Don’t turn ANY number to “1.”

Support
1

Currently when the line begins with any number and dot (“123456789. ”) or spaces and number and dot ( “ 123456789. ”), Agenda deletes the number and replaces it with padded “1.” It forces a numbered list on the user.

There is no way to opt out, selecting “None” for list style will only delete the “1. “ and will create another list starting with “1. “ if a number follows it, until there is no number left. Putting a non-breaking space doesn’t help. It’s extremely frustrating. If there is a way around this, it should really be more user discoverable.

I can’t imagine a use case, where a user might want an arbitrary number replaced with “1.”.

Possible temporary hotfix:
Only convert to numbered list if the line starts with number “1”. Any other number would not start a numbered list. Covers all cases, but “1.” (what if I don’t want a new ordered list even when my line starts with “1. “)?

Possible solutions:

  1. Replace “1." lists with “1)”. While there could be frequent uses for “1.” style outside of numbered lists, it’s quite unlikely to see the line start with “1)” in other context. Normally brackets come in pair.
  2. Internal change. I understand you don’t use markdown, so maybe you can put some invisible symbol so when user manually chooses to change the style to “None”, then respect that choice and allow the line to start with “1.” without forcing an ordered list.
  3. ?
2 Likes
2

We plan to add ways to escape special characters. We’ll also look at improving detection indeed, thanks for the feedback.

3 Likes
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@drewmccormack FYI, perhaps there are already ways to improve things? And good point that once we support escaping markdown we should apply this escape if the user selects “none” in the list.

1 Like
4

I think the answer is indeed to use escaping to override any special handling.

You have just happened to hit a bad case, but any special formatting will hit bad cases sometimes. Eg 1) will undoubtedly be just as bad for some other person.

For now, a workaround is to put anything at all at the start of the line. It will only match the start of a line.

You could also use preformatted paragraph style if it is a bunch of numbers. markdown is ignored in those paragraphs.

We will get to add escaping of text at some point. Thanks for the feedback!

2 Likes
5

This is biting me as well: I’m by now a heavy user of the insert date function, well, today is the March 1, which in my locale is “1. Mar 2021” — except in Agenda it’s a numbered list :frowning:

6

Cheers, that’s indeed a nasty edge case, we’ll have a look.

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Update: Agenda 14 now allows you to escape these kind of sequences and prevent parsing .1 as a list if you type \1. Mar 2021, you can see it in action here