I’m having an issue with Ctrl+Enter in Scrivener. When I’m editing, I can press Ctrl+Enter to insert a line break and it works fine. But after I close Scrivener and reopen the project, all those line breaks are gone — the lines that were separated now combine together.
I need Ctrl+Enter to create a new line within a list item, not to start a new list item (which is what pressing Enter alone does). Without being able to preserve these line breaks, my lists get messed up.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a setting I’m missing, or is this a bug?
Somewhere in the far past I had that problem and I called for help from Google on this and I discovered that the keys OPTION-COMMAND-ENTER works to enter a line break. Muscle memory ever since has show it works all the time. I might be mis-remembering, but I recall CTRL-ENTER used to work, but now the OPTION-COMMAND-ENTER works. I think something changed in macOS along the way.
Ah … now remember this from June 2025 discussed here (found from search):
It’s worth checking whether or not that shortcut is actually inserting a line break:
Check the shortcut you are actually using in Insert ▸ Break ▸ Line Break. The default for Scrivener is ⌥⌘⏎, as noted above. It may have been ⌃⏎ for a while in the past, but that shortcut is no good to use any longer. A recent macOS update took it over as a default shortcut to pull up the contextual menu with the keyboard (same as right-clicking would do).
Of course it is possible to change shortcuts around, which is why it is worth checking.
Next, toggle the View ▸ Text Editing ▸ Show Invisibles menu toggle, and examine what is actually being inserted after the line, when using this shortcut. What you want to see (on the first line):
