Ignores newlines (turns single newlines into spaces) so just as annoying as markdown for me. I'm looking for a text format that has some formatting ability, but

Ignores newlines (turns single newlines into spaces) so just as annoying as markdown for me. I'm looking for a text format that has some formatting ability, but preserves newlines you enter. BBCode is a good one. What makes so many designers of these plain text formatting languages choose to not preserve newlines? I don't get it. Preserving newlines is one of the main features of plain text. This causes the same annoying thing as hacker news comments do, like this intended multiline shopping list: -eggs -flour -milk -sugar -salt