My installation of Scrivener 3.5.1 (MacOS) doesn’t have automatic list creation at all. Neither bulleted nor numbered lists are created automatically when I use the standard keystrokes. Ironically, I used the standard initial keystrokes to illustrate for this post, and the literature and latte forum interface dutifully generated automatic list items for me, as follows:
This bullet was created automatically when I typed the asterisk + space.
This numbered list item was created automatically when I typed the numeral 1 + . + space.
But neither of these classic, cross-platform, universal shortcut behaviors exists anymore in my installation of the Scrivener app for MacOS.
I take automatic list generation to be a near-universal feature of text editors these days. Surely Scrivener wouldn’t intentionally eliminate a basic function available across Word, Pages, Google docs, Notion, Notes.app, Evernote, and all adjacent text-editor apps I know of, right?
TBH I’ve been using Scrivener for about 15 years and I can’t remember it ever doing automatic numbered list generation from typing 1. . It would be nice to have, but AFAIK, it’s never been available. (I could of course be wrong about this and will be miffed to find out…)
Automatic Bulleted list generation has always worked with the system wide opt-tab shortcut (not * ), but AFAICR never numbered lists. It’s the same with TextEdit, which has the same text engine on which Scrivener is based (Pages, Word, etc are based on different engines so what you see there isn’t necessarily applicable to Scrivener.)
The workarounds I’ve used are either to give the numbered list of your choice a shortcut using the system shortcuts feature, or opt-tab then cmd-opt-right until the bullet changes to a number.
(In fact, I use a Keyboard Maestro palette with all the list options, so all I do is type cmd-opt t plus the number of the option – e.g. cmd-opt t1 for an arabic numbered list 1. , cmd-opt t2 for 1) and so on – but it’s the same principle).
Scrivener has never had anything like this. Really the only text it monitors and turns into formatting while typing is the [[...]] pattern, when you have the option enabled in Corrections for that to make links to binder titles.
So you may have had a macro set up that is no longer working? Sometimes updates can break application-specific links to such things. Back when I experimented with using lists instead of pure Markdown, I set myself up with a BetterTouchTool text trigger for Scrivener specifically. Fortunately I still had the configuration laying around in an inert state, and here they are:
Of note, for some reason, after activating them, I had to examine the text trigger settings and save them, before they would work. It could be because BTT has updated numerous times since I used these settings many years ago.
If you do use BTT, you’ll probably want to reset the triggers anyway. I deliberately chose something that would not conflict with Markdown. You also may want to change which numbered list style it uses (the menus are triggered in numerical order, to avoid the weirdness of how Apple actually prints these commands in the List menu).