Treat bullets as a list rather than a comment

[sportpeppers]

I prefer to write my notes using textwidth of 72, and when a given note gets too long it will carriage return and go to a new line. Unfortunately, this creates a new bullet, which is not desired.

If I remove the carriage return for comments using 'fo-=c' then it kind've solves it, but it breaks indentation.

 * this is an example of what 
   I would like to happen when
   a newline occurs

* This is what happens
* when text wraps normally

* This is an example of
what  happens when 
I set fo-=c

So i tend to fix it manually a lot, but reformatting with 'gq' doesnt work properly. I found that if I sacrifice any automatic bullet creation, I can change the bullets to a list (similar to the numbered lists) and get all the behavior I'm after. I've added this to my syntax file ~/.vim/syntax/notes.vim

let &formatlistpat='^\s*\(\d\+[\]:.)}\t ]\|[*\-\+\•\◦\▸\▹\▪\▫][\t ]\)\s*'
set comments=fb:>
set fo-=c

Now I get the indentation i'm after, and it will automatically indent properly if I use 'gq', the '>' in the comments is just to override the defaults that are set in the vim configs. I'm curious if there's a better way to do this? Or if there is a way to get this sort of thing working out of the box?

[gsavovski]

+1 It will be great if let say Shift + Enter skips automatic bullet creation.

@sportpeppers, I tried your manual fix. It works but indents like this:

    • This is how it indents 
    for me.