Rewrapping a bullet point inserts new bullet points

[jefferai]

I had a very long line starting with a bullet point. Without vim-markdown, selecting the text and rewrapping it via gq (to fit in 80 columns) causes the text to be wrapped mostly as expected (with some slight formatting glitches).

With vim-markdown installed, each of these new lines was preceded with an asterisk, causing each wrapped line to be an individual bullet point.

[jefferai]

Strange. I tried it again after first wrapping the text without vim-markdown; in this case, vim-markdown correctly formatted it and did not add any new bullet points.

[jefferai]

I played around with this some more; it seems like when rewrapping text that is already multi-line, it does the correct thing. However, if the text you want to wrap is currently a single long line, it turns each new line into a bullet point.

[cirosantilli]

Please provide a minimal example on the issue description so we an understand it faster ;-)

[jefferai]

I'm not sure how to be clearer than I was. Make a long line starting with a bullet point:

* This is a long line that is preceded by an asterisk, e.g. a Markdown bullet point. When I wrap it bad things will happen.

Wrap it with vim-markdown installed:

* This is a long line that is preceded by an asterisk, e.g. a Markdown bullet
* point. When I wrap it bad things will happen.

Now you have two bullet points.

[alchemicalhydra]

Just ran into this; it only gets triggered when formatoptions includes q.

[timon]

When formatoptions includes t and textwidth is set, this happens each time VIM breaks long line.

[lemontheme]

After a lot of trial and error, I was able to fix this by adding the following to my .vimrc.

autocmd FileType markdown 
    \ set formatoptions-=q |
    \ set formatlistpat=^\\s*\\d\\+\\.\\s\\+\\\|^\\s*\[-*+]\\s\\+

Explanation:

1. As @tomxtobin explains, q is a confusing factor, causing Vim to misidentify Markdown bullets as comment markers. So start by removing that from formatoptions.
2. Markdown bullets are covered by formatlistpat, but – whether intentional or not – the current regex does not allow for indentation. Prefixing this part of formatlistpat with ^\\s* seems to have fixed the rest of the problem.

Disclaimer: I'm still relatively new to Vim. Just wanted to share this in case I'm not the only who one found this default something of a deal-breaker.

[andmatand]

lemontheme's solution does not seem to work for me; in fact, even just havingset formatoptions-=q present makes the next line's indentation too big, like this:

* This is a line and then when I use gq it
    wraps like this

This is in vim 8.0...maybe something has changed in the new version to cause this to no longer work?

[sersorrel]

I think the comments option might be the root cause of this. I'm using Vim 8.1.20, and comments is set to b:*,b:+,b:-,b:> – removing the first three elements from that by setting it to just b:> seems to solve this issue, and avoids the extra indentation that @andmatand mentioned.

[sersorrel]

Turns out this issue was even noted on the buggy commit itself...

The basic problem is that the *, - and + characters are being treated like comment characters, but they are not used like comment characters. The feature is, afaik, intended for this style of comment:

/* asdf
 * some text
 * some more text
 */

but it's being misused for bulleted lists, which look something like this:

- foo bar
- some extreeeeeeeeeeeeeemely long text that
  is so long that it wraps
- some more text

Note that, in the code comment, every line starts with * and when Vim rewraps the comment, it should automatically insert and remove them as needed. But in the Markdown case, only some lines start with - and Vim should never insert or remove bullets automatically when rewrapping.

[dylan-chong]

@shirosaki This is still a problem! (Both the indenting problem in @andmatand 's comment and the auto inserting of bullet points) (see @anowlcalledjosh 's link) Will this get fixed anytime? This problem is very annoying!