Formatting question.

[doobes]

So,

I'm creating some lists from text copied and pasted as plain text.

Looks like this:

I want to bullet the list, so, I highlight the entire list and then apply the bullet. Only it looks like this:

Without manually deleting the CR at the end and then inserting, how do I fix this?

This is one of my MAJOR headaches with Trillium....

thanks

[dosubot[bot]]

This happens because Trilium uses CKEditor 5 for its editor, and when you apply bullets to pasted plain text, CKEditor treats every line break—including extra carriage returns—as a new list item, which creates unwanted blank bullets or spacing. There isn’t a built-in fix or automation for this in Trilium or CKEditor right now, so manual cleanup is often needed source.

To minimize the issue: paste your text using Ctrl+Shift+V to ensure it’s plain text, then check for and remove any extra blank lines before applying bullets source. If you’re working with long lists, you might find it easier to clean up the text in an external editor (like Notepad++ or VS Code) using find/replace to remove blank lines, then paste it back into Trilium.

There’s no Trilium-specific plugin or setting that changes this behavior, but future CKEditor or Trilium updates could improve list and paste handling. For now, manual or external cleanup is the most reliable workaround.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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[doobes]

Response is not really applicable to the question. Text was inserted as plain text.

[eliandoran]

@doobes , it's a relatively normal behavior because the editor can't determine whether the items are part of a single bullet point or they should be treated as multiple bullet points.

Try adding an extra newline after each item:

Film Simulation: Velvia

Dynamic Range: DR200

Highlight: -1

The editor will see the newline and treat it as a new paragraph (translating to a new list item in this case).

[doobes]

Thanks, Elian.

H'mmm. The only way I can make this format correctly is to delete the end of the line character (whatever you want to call it) which causes the next line to concatenate to the line, and then hit enter.

This doesn't behave in a way that any other text editor/word processor I've ever used.

Typing in text in Trilium, and then hitting enter causes the expected behavior, but pasting in text typed in the same manner from a text editor does not.....

Seems like a fundamental design issue to me.

Just the opinion of an old fart

chris

[maphew]

I frequently get the same annoying behaviour when pasting into places like that use webby text areas, Gmail for example. A workaround can be to paste into a non-plain text editor something like Word and then copy-paste again into Trilium. I always assumed it had something to do with platform differences or assumptions on whether newlines are marked with LF or CRLF ('nix/mac/rest-of-world or windows), but maybe it's something else.

Sometimes using ctrl-shift-v to paste instead of ctrl-v to paste can help, but it made no difference in the quick test I just tried with Trilium and Gnome Text Editor on Linux.