what you’re running into in Joplin’s Rich Text (WYSIWYG) editor is how the editor handles line breaks vs. paragraphs:

Enter inserts a

(paragraph) → extra space after each press.

Shift + Enter inserts a
(line break) → smaller spacing.

That behavior comes from the editor engine Joplin uses (TinyMCE) and isn’t configurable directly in the app’s normal settings. But you can override it with a CSS tweak.

Option 1: Userstyle CSS override

Joplin lets you inject custom CSS for the WYSIWYG editor.

  1. In Joplin, go to: Tools → Options → Appearance → Show Advanced Settings → Custom stylesheet for rendered Markdown (This opens the location of userstyle.css and userchrome.css in your profile directory.)

  2. Open userstyle.css and add something like:

/* Reduce spacing between paragraphs in the rich text editor */ .tox .mce-content-body p { margin-block-start: 0.2em !important; margin-block-end: 0.2em !important; }

You can adjust the 0.2em to your preference (default is closer to 1em).

  1. Save the file, then restart Joplin. Now pressing Enter should insert paragraphs with much less vertical spacing.

Option 2: Change Enter behavior (advanced)

If you’d prefer Enter = line break (br) and Shift+Enter = paragraph, you’d have to modify Joplin’s TinyMCE config.

There isn’t a simple setting exposed for this in the UI.

You’d need to patch the editor initialization code in Joplin’s source (changing TinyMCE’s forcedrootblock or enterkeybehavior options).

This means running a self-built Joplin, so it’s more work than most users want.

✅ Easiest solution: Use userstyle.css to shrink the default paragraph spacing.

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