I know this has been asked a thousand times before, but somehow I don't see a straight answer. I would also like someone to explain why most of the existing suggestions would intuitively do the exact opposite of what one would expect to want here.
How do I get Wordpress (classic editor) to respect paragraph breaks in the visual editor? My client does not want to interact with the html text editor. No, shift + enter does not work. In fact, even in the visual editor, this appears to add a line break rather than a paragraph break. I've seen a number of suggestions say the exact opposite, which is really weird.
Neither enter nor shift + enter appears to add an actual new character if I toggle over to the text editor (no or anything).
If I manually wrap the paragraphs with <p> </p> tags in the text editor, I get the desired behavior.
The most common suggestion seems to be adding remove_filter ('the_content', 'wpautop'); to functions.php. This doesn't work, nor would I expect it to, given that what I evidently want to do is ADD <p> tags. I tried the same with an add_filter instead and that didn't have an effect either.
I find it completely mind-blowing that there isn't a simple option for this, and that other similar posts don't have a clear answer. I don't want to use a third-party plugin, and again I need everything on the client interface to be controllable from the visual editor. The ideal behavior would be for the client to just press enter and have Wordpress wrap the paragraph in <p> tags. Thanks for reading!