Bear 2.0 (9619): No way to differentiate between internal and external links

Splitting this out for visibility.

There is no way to distinguish between internal and external links. You need to either place your cursor next to an external link before the link icon appears, or you need to click on the link to determine the outcome (left click or right click). I would suggest using the link emoji that Bear 1.0 uses for external links - which also makes editing links much simpler with a single click. With Bear 2.0, it now requires multiple clicks to edit a link. See images below.

Bear 2.0:

Bear 1.0:

Related, for internal note-to-note links, it would be very helpful if the linked note does not yet exist that the link color be dimmed. Otherwise, you don’t know whether or not the note exists until you click the link and see whether an existing note or a blank one opens.

5 Likes

Agree it would be useful to have a differentiation between external and internal links. Another option would be just have different styling, maybe internal links could be underlined.
I love how Craft’s internal links look:
Captura de Pantalla 2022-10-10 a la(s) 13.26.56

I don’t have the beta yet… but do you see the icon if you disable ‘auto hide markdown’?
That works in standalone Panda at least. (not sure if there are different icons for internal/external links)

Why not keeping the double brackets? They are so common among all the notes and pkm apps so that everybody know what they mean. Apart from that I find them even aesthetically pleasing and they are anyway used as markdown tags. It is not necessary reinventing the weel

I dislike the aesthetics of crafts handling. For sure that is a matter of taste but I find it ugly :man_shrugging::wink:

we are exploring different solutions for differentiating internal and external links in Bear. Our intention is not to have the markers or an icon showing because we don’t think it’ll be in line with how markdown is rendered in Bear 2, but rather work on the link style.

4 Likes

There is one reason more I like about the brackets around crosslinks. They not only appear inside of text but you also can place several of them in its own line side to side and you can still separate them easily. I hope you will keep that. Why not something similar like the background colour for tags but more a rectangle shape?

So long as you don’t take a step backwards from Bear 1.0. Currently in Bear 1, it only takes a single click to edit an external link. Please don’t turn that into two clicks in Bear 2.0 - especially if one of those needs to be a right-click. That would be incredibly frustrating for those who work extensively with external links. Thank you.

Yes, this is emerging as feedback from multiple users and maybe we have to change our mind about the edit link icon.

2 Likes

Not to mention that adding back the edit link icon solves the issue of differentiating between internal and external links. No need to do anything more complicated like changing colors or font weight or underline. Just have the edit link icon for external links and be done with it. Thanks again!

2 Likes

I really like the edit link icon in Bear 1.0 for all the reasons apgold mentions, and I would be happy if you keep it in Bear 2.0. If you think it might turn some users off, you could provide a setting to enable/disable it.

1 Like

But the icon (as well as 1 click edit) returns when you turn off ‘auto hide markdown’, right?
(At least in Panda) That seems the way to go.

Showing link icons even when markdown is hidden seems a weird exception?

There is no “hide markdown” in Bear 2.0. That was only a Panda (alpha) option. And I don’t consider a link icon to be “markdown”. What I do consider markdown would be this: [Bear page](https://bear.app/). And you are right - definitely do not want to show that unless the user is explicitly editing a link.

So I’m envisioning something like this for Bear 2.0 external links:
Screen Shot 2022-10-12 at 11.14.05 AM
But that’s just my awful attempt at an external link icon. I think what Bear 1.0 uses is much nicer (minus the brackets and parentheses of course, and perhaps making the icon a tiny bit smaller).

bear-link-2

2 Likes

The internal crosslinks should also be considered. Here two screenshots that shows the problem with current implementation bear 2:

Bildschirmfoto 2022-10-12 um 23.29.31 bear 1

Bildschirmfoto 2022-10-12 um 23.31.40 bear 2

1 Like

Or you could use commas :wink:

How about keep external links looking like they do now, and maybe internal links get a dotted underline or just underline (dotted might look like a misspelled word).

Or vice versa.

The problem is that you need to make a workaround which was not necessary before.

If you want to differentiate another colour for cross and external links would do the job

I vote for small icon rather than differentiating by colour. If internal and external simply has colour difference, then you basically have to ‘learn’ for which colour is which, even more so if you are using various themes. It is not something hard to do, but I think the below is much easier to work with.

Also,

the new hidden format is nicer for those who have links within the paragraph. I think people will complain why this is not hidden while all the other formats can be hidden depending on people. There are many little stuff that may not fully convert to the new system as we were accustomed to the old way of using Bear. But I think that is what we have to get used to. Personally, I would have used comma regardless of existence of bracket but that is just me :kissing:

2 Likes

I like the double brackets as visual and plastic presentation of another note, even inline of a sentence. For sure i can live with each solution that will come but i if an option (like in other tools) to show the brackets would be offered i won’t hesitate one second to use it