Your using plain text edit instead of HTML.

If you want indented lists try using the HTML editor and the appropriate style.

For a quick way to change, hold shift when you click compose.

For the longer term ensure compose in HTML is selected in the composition and addressing pane of account settings.

I don't want to send anyone HTML email (I'm one of those guys), but having a text editor that behaves a bit more predictably would be great.

Why is the bar set so low that the (limited) behavior of a browser textarea should be good enough for a Thunderbird user? Couldn't we aim higher? Maybe there's even code in Claws or other user-friendly editors that could be lifted?

Well I've achieved it using two different methods.

I have composing in HTML selected in Account Settings. option 1 In HTML: Type the message and use the 'indent formatting option to force the entire paragraph as an indent. repeat for subsequent numbered paragraphs.

then select : Options > Delivery format > Plain text only. Send email.

option2: Hold 'shift' and click on 'Write' to start using as Plain Text. type number and paragraph indent/tab the start just before number 1. highlight number and paragraph EDit > Rewrap position cursor where second line needs to indent and use tab to indent. repeat for subsequent paragraphs.

Note: If window is made too narrow then it forces the eg: first line to wrap without indent and places the indented second line on a new line. So you would need to widen the window to correct width to see correctly. But that is user viewing preference. I checked the source and it looks correct.

Thanks for those hints. Editing in HTML does work, though it leaves no control over how many spaces the text is indented.

The second method works as well, but it's really fragile. You add some more words in text you've previously indented and you have to reindent everything below, plus join the lines that got split by your previous indents.

Claws somehow handles those cases, I don't know how.

So do you think it's out of the question that the editor itself might be made smarter at some point? No real demand?

I am sorry, but text Contains no formatting. None.

Every attempt I have see to try and make it have formatting is fragile at best and producing clown like results at worst.

Finally the bar is set at Text. The lowest common denominator here is lines of text terminated by either a Carriage return line feed pair (windows) or line feed (Linux). That present it's own problems with non wrapping etc.

Anything more assumes a fixed width display font (courier usually). Not the default in Windows with proportional fonts the default.

Any form of markup for tabs or bullets is just that. Markup and there for the document is no longer text. While formatted text is common in the UNIX/Linus world Vi for example, it is invariably displayed fixed width and is not cross platform. So the bar here is set as cross platform text.

You may call yourself on of "those people" if you wish. That does not change the basic description of Text.

I realize that text is a limiting factor and it's not fortunate that some webmail systems show text messages in a variable width font. On a real client, we have a choice, though: Thunderbird, too, shows plain text messages with a fixed width font by default, so everything is fine, things look great.

Text can be structured and formatted, look at Markdown which looks OK both in source and in parsed form, or look at hundreds of RFCs, they are all beautifully formatted. It's not markup, no, but it's formatting.

I was just puzzled why Thunderbird would actively stop me from editing my text like I would in other mail clients. If you say "this is how it's meant to be and we're not changing it", that's as good an answer as any.