Okay, I’m bringing this over to the discussion on the style + list bug, as others might benefit from any talk of workarounds and the particulars of it. The other thread I just left there for anyone searching the forum for the KeepWithNext placeholder popping up.
It seems to me (and I know this is an uninformed guess) that the attributes of the list, particularly where it begins and ends, are ‘spilling over’ and affecting the attributes of - in this case - a Heading above (or even below) it. By giving that same Heading a bullet etc. Yes?
Yes, I would say that’s probably pretty close to what is happening. The style markers are being placed incorrectly, in the list formatting itself, which breaks the list formatting and can cause the style assignment to bleed across lines.
And given that, in theory an empty line, or any “no style” line between the two should avoid it. It does in my testing anyway.
Bear in mind that if you are doing this directly, you might be pasting right back into the corrupted list formatting, even if the document is empty. It’s a good idea to navigate to another binder item and back, before inserting the cleaned text. It’s the same principle for how if you type a bold word into an empty file, cut it, and then use Paste and Match Style it will return bold. If you instead navigate away and return, it will paste default no style.
These are side-effects of invisible mechanisms that make life better for us in most cases. If you backspace over the last bold character and then type, you don’t have to apply bold again, the cursor holds that formatting temporarily, in the likely case you still want it. If you move the cursor or look at another binder item, stray formatting is automatically cleaned up to avoid files becoming bloated with unused formatting.
Lastly, for broken lists it is almost always easier to select the entire list and maybe even a line above and below, and use Format ▸ Lists ▸ None, then again to pick the bullet type you want. That almost always works, and it avoids having to manually reformat everything within the list (italics, links, whatever), as a full round-trip to a plain-text editor will do. Naturally any duplicated bullets that aren’t part of the list anymore will remain, but they are just tabs and characters at that point—precisely why they paste into BBEdit in the first place.