The other day, I wrote that you never stop learning Emacs. There’s always something new to learn. I just saw a post that reminded me that—at least for me—you never stop relearning Emacs either.
The post asked about why indentation was not working properly for alphabetical lists. I didn’t understand the question. I didn’t have any problems with Alphabetical lists and I was sure I hadn’t done anything special to enable them. One of the commenters explained that what the poster was experiencing was the expected behavior because by default Org Mode doesn’t recognize alphabetical lists and that he needed to set org-list-allow-alphabetical to t, to enable them.
I called describe-variable on org-list-allow-alphabetical and it told me that the default value was nil but that it had been reset to t. Where did that come from? I searched my Git logs and discovered that I had made the change 11 years ago. I have no memory of why I did it or what problem I was trying to solve.
In a sense, it doesn’t matter because I now have things set correctly for my workflow but what if someone had asked me the same question the poster asked? I wouldn’t have been able to help them because the issue had disappeared from my consciousness.
In any event, if you want to use alphabetical lists, be sure to enable org-list-allow-alphabetical.