Text formatting inside a paragraph acting like a numbered list

Question

For markdown files and the like, I have formatoptions set to tln and I am using a simplified version of formatlistpat that looks for digits and a * character. The indenting on a list works fine, the way I expect it to.

But, when I have a paragraph with numbers in it, where the auto-wrap causes the line to start with a numeric, it is acting like that line is a numbered list and indents the following line.

Example:

When you are writing code in Python
3.12, you need to ensure that you
   are using the latest version.

This drives me crazy enough that I have a function to quickly turn formatting on and off. Is there a better way to detect what is and isn't a list? Some way to say if the list section doesn't have a blank leading line it isn't a list? A way of invoking Q} two different ways, with and without list formatting?

Any tips / configuration help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I would suggest:

set autoindent
set indentexpr=

I suspect that indentexpr is automatically set to GetMarkdownIndent() that add the indentation you don't want.

The pattern I have used is:

set formatlistpat=^\\s*\\(\\d\\+[.)]\\\|\\*\\)\\s 

or

let &formatlistpat='^\s*\(\d\+[.)]|\*\)\s'

This to accept:

  * bullet1
  * bullet2

or

  1. bullet1
  2. bullet2

But not:

  3.12, foo
  3.1 bar

Remark: tested with:

set formatoptions=tln
set autoindent
set indentexpr=
set textwidth=80