List Indenting Number of Spaces

Bear feedback Feature Request
1

Current Behavior

  • When starting an unordered list in Bear, when I am indenting some items to nest them inside of others, and then go to copy the Markdown into another program, it renders as
- List
  - of 
  - items
- And more
  - Test

Notably, the indented bullets are indented by the use of two space characters.

Desired Behavior

Four spaces instead of two. e.g:

- List
    - of 
    - items
- And more
    - Test

Why

Most other apps do not recognize the two spaces as being a proper indent. Just try it here on Discourse (the forum software) if you’d like one example. Not asking for any change in how it renders in-app, just want the underlying Markdown to use the proper number of spaces. I hate forgetting and then needing to do a regex find/replace of ^ - to -.

2

Proper is not well defined in this case. Different parsers have different requirements and some argue that we should have tabs instead. The parser follows the CommonMark standard that supports both spaces and tabs.

When you edit a list we insert spaces to have the markdown line up nicely, and for a plain unnumbered list, that is two spaces. This makes the resulting markdown easy to read, but you are right, using tabs or four spaces would probably be compatible with more external tools overall. The best thing would be if more tools supported the standard.

1 Like
3

Thanks, I was unfamiliar with the CommonMark handling of this. While I see a minimum for rendering an indent as two spaces, I also notice in their dingus that they use 4 spaces in pre-loaded sample. I’d thus advocate that 4 spaces is not in violation of the spec as a behavior (though I could still be misunderstanding) and for it to at least be in the settings to toggle 2 vs 4