It seems a little tricky to do much better.

With numbering you can do something like this where you find the last
element of the previous list, and then continue it. This won't do what you
want for nested lists I guess. For lettering, you would need to figure out
how to increment the letter. but for simple numbered lists, this might do
the trick for you.

#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp
(defun auto-continue ()
  (interactive)
  (when-let (p (org-in-item-p))
    (save-excursion
      (goto-char (line-end-position))
      (goto-char (org-element-property :contents-begin
(org-element-context)))
      (let* ((lists (org-element-map (org-element-parse-buffer) 'plain-list
     (lambda (lst)
(when (eq 'ordered (org-element-property :type lst))
 (cons
  (org-element-property :end lst)
  (length (org-element-property :structure lst)))))))
    (last-list (nth (- (or (-find-index (lambda (x)
  (> (car x) (point)))
lists)
   (length lists))
1)
    lists)))
(insert (format "[@%s] " (+ 1 (cdr last-list))))
(org-ctrl-c-ctrl-c)))))

#+END_SRC


John

-----------------------------------
Professor John Kitchin
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803
@johnkitchin
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu



On Sat, Nov 2, 2019 at 5:49 AM Jarmo Hurri <jarmo.hurri@iki.fi> wrote:

>
> Greetings.
>
> I know that lists can be continued using the following syntax:
>
> # -----------------------------------------------------------
> * First heading
>   1. a list begins here
> * Second heading
>   2. [@2] list continues
> # -----------------------------------------------------------
>
> I find myself doing this all the time, especially when working on Beamer
> slides.
>
> Given how smart org mode is (it is!), I find manual list continuation
> weird. My questions are:
>
> a. Is there already a better way?
> b. [@b] Could we have one?
>
> Jarmo
>
>
>