Lyx: Reduce vertical spacing of items [in UI only]

Question

I like to use lists to structure my ideas before writing them down. To organize these notes it is very convenient to have shortcuts to exchange and change the level of indentation (just as in Emacs Orgmode). Lyx can do this.

Unfortunately the vertical space between the items in the UI is quite large, so it takes up too much space and is a little confusing to look at. Is there any way to reduce the amount of vertical space between these items in the UI? (preferably to a single space)

Just for clarification: I'm not interested to modify the vertical space in the output document, but the way the items are displayed in the Lyx UI.

Answer 1

Short answer

In Document settings ▷ Local layout, add the following lines:

Style Itemize
  ItemSep 0
  ParSep 0
End
Style Enumerate
  ItemSep 0
  ParSep 0
End

Then click Validate, Convert to latest format, and Apply.

General answer

This sort of question pops up frequently, so I would like to outline a general method that does not require the user to read the whole Customization manual. In LyX it is easy to do this kind of customization of screen elements:

1. Locate the definition of the element you want to change. For instance here it is the Itemize and Enumerate styles in layouts/stdlists.inc in LyX's installation directory. Other elements will generally be defined in other files of the layouts directory.
2. Try to change values or add new desired properties in the corresponding style in the Local Layout. It is possible to only change or add desired values of a style with the syntax Style … End as in the example above (for instance here by looking at the original definition I saw that I wanted to change the value of ItemSep). The Local Layout tab makes it easy to do so by trial-and-error (for instance I found that setting ItemSep 0 was not enough so I further tried and also set ParSep 0).

Optionally, the local layout can be then made into a module to avoid doing copy-paste across documents, and for this you should refer to the Customization manual.