How to write multi-line list items?

[zambuttus]

As I follow the convention to insert line breaks after full stops / periods or long sub-clauses, I want to be consistent throughout my publication, including enumerations and itemize environments. But I cannot find a way to achieve this without fiddling with auto-insertions of \item keywords everytime.

What I want to do:

\begin{itemize}
    \item Short line
    \item Long sentence I just wrote.<<CURSOR_IS_HERE>>
          <<CURSOR_WANTS_TO_LAND_HERE>>Second sentence of this item I will soon write.
\end{itemize}

What I tried:

• Enter: inserts \item keyword, resulting in assinginment of a list entry per sentence
• Ctrl + Enter: line break without generating \item, cursor remains where it is. Also spaces won't be generated, so now I would need to press arrow-right, followed by typing 10 times the space bar.
• Shift + Enter: Would be the key combination most intuitive to me because it is often used in other applications in such a context, e.g. in messengers for line breaking inside a message without sending it. Instead, it behaves the same like a simple press on Enter.
• Alt + Enter: different IDE function
• Custom Live Template inserting a line break and moving the cursor: my current hack for which I cannot find an optimal solution; it successfully skips generating \item, but also skips indentation or (in case of also adding a single space to the template) indents either too much or not enough (sometimes the offset calculation includes \item length, sometimes not, and always includes the unnecessary single space).

Did I miss something or could my thinking maybe result in a feature request for Shift + Enter handling?

[slideclimb]

The Ctrl+Enter and Shift+Enter shortcuts are meant to work consistently with the rest of the JetBrains IDEs. That means:

• Ctrl+Enter invokes the split line action, and
• Shift+Enter invokes the start new line action, which is basically a compound of moving the caret to the end of the current line and then hitting Enter. Since that inserts a \item, invoking this action will as well.

Have you tried recording a macro?

Personally I don't think there's any changing of shortcuts we can do without causing confusion one way or the other. Removing Shift+Enter from the start new line action in tex files probably causes more confusion than it's worth. I also don't see any other modifiers+Enter combination that's still free.

There might be a case to make for using an extra indent on the second line of an \item, as now once you format your indentation will disappear and your example becomes

\begin{itemize}
    \item Short line
    \item Long sentence I just wrote.
    Second sentence of this item I will soon write.
\end{itemize}

Whether or not you will prefer this with or without extra indentation comes down to personal style, but I can image providing an option for this indent in the formatter (code style).

[zambuttus]

Okay, interesting! I will look into macros in the upcoming days, thanks!
So, there are two topics combined here:

1. How much to indent subsequent lines of a list's item text, either to align with the item keyword or to align with the textual content. Though I find the latter more readable, I understood from you that none of these options is the by far more widespread one and more a choice of personal preference. So, only talking about my own personal preference for a moment, I of course would be glad to be able to toggle a setting so that the plugin shares my ideology of content-aligned indenting 😄
2. Being able to write multi-line items to begin with when being in the flow of writing, without triggering auto-generation of \item, for which no key combination of modifier+Enter seems available. After a bit of testing, I cannot identify a difference between Shift+Enter and Ctrl+Shift+Enter (which could be a valid candidate if there are no IDE conventions already existing), but, well, yesterday I also did not have the use cases for Shift+Enter in mind 😅.
   Seems like another workaround could be to just write everything on line 1 and after finishing the item text, walking with the cursor along the line and pressing Ctrl+Enter a few times or following context action's suggestions to insert line feeds (though as far as I know this only looks for periods and not for overly long sentences with sub-clauses). And then, we would be back at topic number 1. But this way of doing it feels a bit like interrupting the flow, but maybe that's also more of a personal preference here.

[slideclimb]

I don't have time to write a detailed answer right now, so I will come back to you later. Right now two things come to mind:

1. You can find all the actions bound to a shortcut in the keymap settings. If I remember correctly, Ctrl+Shift+Enter was bound to something for me.
2. Do you know about soft wraps (2nd setting)?

[PHPirates]

I would be inclined to follow the Markdown plugin for enter-actions in lists. As far as I can see they don't have anything configured in the plugin to directly support what you want, but you could ask them.

If a macro doesn't work well enough, we could still provide an action you could bind to a shortcut.

[zambuttus]

After a full day trial, I think for now a custom macro fits my use case well enough. It has three steps: Enter (IntelliJ calls it "Action: EditorEnter"), Shift+Home ("Action: EditorLineStartWithSelection") and typing six space characters. Works both at the end of lines and in the middle of.
Binding to a useful keystroke then was the final challenge (though my solution is very special, I chose F13 key and made use of my fancy keyboard features to put F13 on my right Shift key).

So yeah, think I can work with that. Thanks for the hints! 🙂

[PHPirates]

Thanks for sharing, I have updated the documentation to suggest macros