(I sent this feedback directly to @matteo; he suggested others might find it interesting if I share it publicly).
Migration
Database migration took about eight minutes for my 3,195 notes. At that length, you’ll probably need a progress bar.
The raw count of notes is the same in the post-migration database—that’s a good start. As far as I can tell, everything is as it should be. That’s tough to do… nice work!
It appears that my editor preferences were not migrated, but that may be expected, given your remarks about preferences being missing from this build.
Praise
• I’m loving the new type hierarchy and metrics in the editor. I feel the tremendous amount of attention you all have clearly put into this.
• The image resizing affordance is really lovely and fluid.
• The bullet folding functionality is a huge deal for me—I do a lot of outlining—and it appears to work quite well.
• The Markdown-hiding behaviors appear to work gracefully and effectively; I’m grateful to have the syntax hidden in the common case.
⁃ One small usability issue this introduces: it’s no longer evident when a link is internal (i.e. Wiki-style) or external. I use both types extensively and find it disorienting to click and not be able to form an expectation what’s going to happen (will it open a browser? navigate in Bear?).
• The table implementation seems fluid and effective. You’ve nailed a huge number of details. Small things like the behavior of arrow keys are working great.
⁃ One small issue: I often make tables about experiments whose cells are a simple X / √. For these, I’d expect the cells to auto-resize to a more sensible width. Maybe I just missed some way to resize them?!
• While it sacrifices some vertical density, I think it was a great choice to move the time and decorators to a new line in the list: the wide left margin in Bear 1 made for too short a horizontal line length.
Small issues found so far
• When the cursor is positioned in a list bullet, Cmd+Left moves the cursor to the beginning of the bullet—even if it’s on an earlier line—not to the beginning of the line. In an ordinary paragraph, Cmd+Left moves the cursor to the beginning of the line. In Bear 1 (and in standard NSTextViews), Cmd+Left moves the cursor to the beginning of the line in bulleted lists and ordinary paragraphs.
• I’m really liking the typographic rhythm in the new note list. But I notice that—to my eye—attachments seem to have just slightly too much margin above them, relative to the other labels.
• Search appears to be happening on the main thread. When I press Cmd+Shift+F and rapidly type a string, my characters appear many frames behind my keystrokes.
⁃ I’d suggest performing the search asynchronously; adding a light debounce; and perhaps indexing somewhat more aggressively. nvAlt shows that ~0-latency search is possible! Something to aspire to.
⁃ Bear 1 has the same behavior, so this is not a regression! Just thought that your revamped search might have addressed this.
• I like that the new info panel can be torn off. One nit: as I understand the standard macOS utility window pattern, the expected HIG behavior is that the info panel displays information about whichever window currently has focus. Right now, it displays information about the window it “came from”, irrespective of which window has focus.
• I’m not sure if you’d consider this a bug, but it appears that tag parsing has changed slightly. I have a few notes in Bear 1 which include the string “#1" (intended in an ordinal sense—“number 1”—not in the sense of a tag). In Bear 1, this was not interpreted as a tag; in Bear 2, it is; so now my tag list has a bunch of numbers in it. Maybe that’s the more consistent behavior! Still, it’s a bit obnoxious.
Summary impressions
I’m very happy with the new editor. Tables, footnotes, nestable styles, and hidden Markdown were never huge issues for me, but they’re all appreciated. The new experience feels polished and lovely; I’d be happy living in it.