I found myself losing the default indentation when I added a bulleted list to a paragraph (I incremented the bullets by one tab so that they would be inside the indentation of the text above them. When I hit return a few times, I was able to terminate the list reasonably so, but I lost indentation. Is there a way to tell the editor to resume indentation properly?
The easiest thing to do is put your cursor in a normal paragraph, and create or update a “Body” or “Normal” preset, with the Format/Formatting/ sub-menu. That gives you a menu item that you can bind to a keyboard shortcut in the OS X Keyboard : Keyboard Shortcuts preference pane, so that whenever you switch to one exceptional form of formatting or another, you can always easily get back to the default.
Another thing some people do when working in a streamed formatting editor like this is to avoid working in a top-down fashion, and go back to make exceptional formatting after they have already written around it.