2.8 Plain lists

Within an entry of the outline tree, hand-formatted lists can provide additional structure. They also provide a way to create lists of checkboxes (see Checkboxes). Org supports editing such lists, and the HTML exporter (see Exporting) parses and formats them.

Org knows ordered lists, unordered lists, and description lists.

• Unordered list items start with ‘-’, ‘+’, or ‘*’¹ as bullets.
• Ordered list items start with a numeral followed by either a period or a right parenthesis, such as ‘1.’ or ‘1)’.
• Description list items are like unordered list items, but contain the separator ‘ :: ’ to separate the description term from the desciption.

Items belonging to the same list must have the same indentation on the first line. In particular, if an ordered list reaches number ‘10.’, then the 2–digit numbers must be written left-aligned with the other numbers in the list. Indentation also determines the end of a list item. It ends before the next line that is indented like the bullet/number, or less. Empty lines are part of the previous item, so you can have several paragraphs in one item. If you would like an empty line to terminate all currently open plain lists, configure the variable org-empty-line-terminates-plain-lists. Here is an example:

     ** Lord of the Rings
        My favorite scenes are (in this order)
        1. The attack of the Rohirrim
        2. Eowyns fight with the witch king
           + this was already my favorite scene in the book
           + I really like Miranda Otto.
        3. Peter Jackson being shot by Legolas
            - on DVD only
           He makes a really funny face when it happens.
        But in the end, not individual scenes matter but the film as a whole.
        Important actors in this film are:
        - Elijah Wood :: He plays the Frodo
        - Sean Austin :: He plays the Sam, Frodos friend.  I still remember
          him very well from his role as Mikey Walsh a in the Goonies.

Org supports these lists by tuning filling and wrapping commands to deal with them correctly², and by exporting them properly (see Exporting).

The following commands act on items when the cursor is in the first line of an item (the line with the bullet or number).

<TAB>

Items can be folded just like headline levels if you set the variable org-cycle-include-plain-lists. The level of an item is then given by the indentation of the bullet/number. Items are always subordinate to real headlines, however; the hierarchies remain completely separated.

If org-cycle-include-plain-lists has not been set, <TAB> fixes the indentation of the current line in a heuristic way.

M-<RET>

Insert new item at current level. With a prefix argument, force a new heading (see Structure editing). If this command is used in the middle of a line, the line is split and the rest of the line becomes the new item³. If this command is executed in the whitespace before a bullet or number, the new item is created before the current item. If the command is executed in the white space before the text that is part of an item but does not contain the bullet, a bullet is added to the current line.

M-S-<RET>

Insert a new item with a checkbox (see Checkboxes).

S-<up>

S-<down>

Jump to the previous/next item in the current list.

M-S-<up>

M-S-<down>

Move the item including subitems up/down (swap with previous/next item of same indentation). If the list is ordered, renumbering is automatic.

M-S-<left>

M-S-<right>

Decrease/increase the indentation of the item, including subitems. Initially, the item tree is selected based on current indentation. When these commands are executed several times in direct succession, the initially selected region is used, even if the new indentation would imply a different hierarchy. To use the new hierarchy, break the command chain with a cursor motion or so.

C-c C-c

If there is a checkbox (see Checkboxes) in the item line, toggle the state of the checkbox. If not, this command makes sure that all the items on this list level use the same bullet. Furthermore, if this is an ordered list, make sure the numbering is OK.

C-c -

Cycle the entire list level through the different itemize/enumerate bullets (‘-’, ‘+’, ‘*’, ‘1.’, ‘1)’). With a numeric prefix argument N, select the Nth bullet from this list. If there is an active region when calling this, all lines will be converted to list items. If the first line already was a list item, any item markers will be removed from the list. Finally, even without an active region, a normal line will be converted into a list item.

S-<left>/<right>

Also cycle bullet styles when in the first line of an item.