Blank lines between senctions in Markdown format

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Morgul

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Feb 22, 2026, 8:18:27 AM (2 days ago) Feb 22
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Markdown is a format designed to be human-readable as plain text, and I've been keeping my Markdown documents clean and readable as plain text. And it seems Leo editor by default messes up a little bit with that human-readability in regards to blank lines between sections not being kept when saving.

When you're reading a plain text file in Markdown format, it makes a lot of sense visually to have extra blank lines between sections or subsections (at least between the higher level ones).

For example:

# Chapter 1: one

This is the first chapter

## 1.1 Something

This is something


# Chapter 2: two

Welcome to chapter 2

With beefy documents specially, blank lines between sections bring a lot of clarity (for example, to identify when the topics change, or to quickly find where the next sections or chapters are), when skimming or paging through them in text mode.

Leo importer seems to love to add blank lines at the end of nodes, then Leo happily ignores them when saving, leaving exactly one line of text between sections. I can't guess how the importer decides how many blank lines to add at the end of nodes, but it's not always the same amount and it doesn't seem to match the number of blank lines between sections in the original document.

Does Leo have any @ settings for my expected behavior? I'd be happy if Leo would simply write as many (extra) blank lines between sections as black lines there are at end of nodes. So, if a node has zero blank lines at the end, it should only leave one blank line between that node and next section's node.

Take into account also that the importer must be changed for that purpose, as it will have to add exactly the required number of white lines and the end of nodes as the original document has, for the saving operation to result in the closest match possible of the original document. But if there's a setting to choose how many blank lines to put between what kind of sections, it's acceptable when saving to correct the document where it used the wrong number of blank lines between their sections.

I'd also love it if it was possible for Leo (at least with some setting) to not need an empty blank line at the start of a node, and still when saving it adding a blank line after the header of the section. That would require the importer to do it that way as well, to not force me to have to manually (or semi-automatically, as having to run some command is) remove those initial blank lines on hundreds of nodes.

By the way, how does Leo know which Markdown header format to use, is there setting for that? Or does it always use leading #? Even when importing a document that formatted them with - or = on the next line, disregarding the user's choice? Some user might want to use different kind of header formats for different levels.

And please consider the ideal that Leo always tries by default to detect and use the original document's format when importing without needing to do anything special for it, so when saving it, it results in a file with exactly the same content, at the very least for text files.

Leo looks smart by for example detecting a Python file I'm importing uses tabs as indentation, but if it then makes its own decisions to intentionally change the format without even giving a warning or asking the user, that will not be welcomed by all users.

I understand you might sometimes want to prioritize some standards of format, but please, don't impose them by default without warning the user, specially when Leo can support either.

The rationale for this can be this one: a project uses a specific format, if I import files from its git repository without changes on the working directory, and then I save, I should still be able to see on git status that there's no changes on the working directory. Leo shouldn't change the format to whatever you think is the "correct" or most common one, as the project might reject changes made to the format.

Félix

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Feb 23, 2026, 11:47:46 AM (17 hours ago) Feb 23
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@Morgul, Thanks for this report. I've got lots of markdown files in the docs of LeoJS, so I'll look into this shortly. 

But I wonder: Are you using @clean or @auto? can you check if there's a difference with this behavior? 

Thanks again for your reports on this matter :)

Félix
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