Email as Plain Text. Is it possible?

How do I get email to show as plain text? Things I’ve tried:

  • Copy as Plain Text, then pasting
  • ⌘ + K, then removing the link

I’m not sure what else to try. In Craft, I can repeat the second bullet point and delete the link and I’m done.

In Apple Notes, there’s a “Remove Link” option:

However, in Bear, I can’t find it. Am I missing something?

Thank you.

Hello,
email handles and URLs are automatically detected by Bear’s editor and displayed with the link to facilitate opening them. As far as I can remember we not received requests for removing automatic linking, may I ask why you want the links removed?

I don’t think email links should be removed altogether. Just having the option to remove them would be nice. The reason for this is I keep a list of different emails (login test accounts) for work as I can’t remember them all. I have them in a table paired up with a password and some other info related to the account. When testing my code, I will log in with these different accounts. I would like to be able to remove the link so I can quickly triple-click inside the cell with the email, hit ⌘ + C to copy and move on. Can’t do that with the link attached.

Thanks for the explanation.
I understand the use case but I don’t have a good alternative solution for you at the moment. You can triple click in the table cell corners but it’s not very handy.

If you have them in a table, you can still do what you want. Simply triple-click within the table cell but not on the text directly.

An alternative would be to use a code block (three backticks on the line before the email, and three backticks on the line after).

@trix180 testing this made me discover a bug: code blocks don’t get properly rendered within a table, although they still disable automatic link recognition. This happens also with only the leading backticks:

Zrzut ekranu 2022-11-8 o 11.19.29

I would expect code blocks to be rendered properly. Code with single backticks does work within the table.

Tables don’t allow “real” multi-lines because of their syntax. What we do to is place <br> in the note text and treat them as new lines but the real content of the cell in your example is

| ```<br>email@example.com<br>``` |     |
|--------------------------|-----|
|                          |     |

And can’t be considered a code block by markdown standards.
It does work to disable auto-linking tho.

Given that tables aren’t a part of CommonMark spec, why not diverge here and allow multilines? Is it a limitation of the library you’re using?

No, and in theory, we can diverge and have the block working with
and new lines, but we’ll be the only one supporting this. It’s true tables are not part of cmark but their syntax is used as it is by different engines (GitHub might be the most famous).

Good point. There is one way that some Markdown apps support multi-line content in tables: transclusion, i.e., embedding of other notes.

Here an example from Taio, but you can also do that in Obsidian, for example:

Source code looks like this:
Zrzut ekranu 2022-11-8 o 16.43.06

If you ever decide to implement transclusion, that would be one solution people could use.

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eg: “log.com_xxxxxxxxx”
this is a plain text, but “log.com” will be autolinks.
put it into code block is ok, but will change its color.
hope add a “remove link” option too.

Hi @trix180 . i recently came across a situation where i wanted to be able to remove a link. there are certain words (usually names of brands and companies) that have characters with a dot in the middle somewhere between the word and without spaces in between. such words are automatically rendered as links even when not intended.

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Just thought I’d update this with something else I noticed:

First, I tried putting the emails inside back ticks, but then I can’t triple click as it would grab the back ticks as well.

Secondly, I tried just leaving them as links cause I thought I’d be able to just quickly right-click the email and then click “Copy Link”. However, this only works outside of a table. Right-clicking an email inside of a table selects the whole table. I didn’t try this with other kinds of links, only emails.

Would be nice if emails and possibly all links were recognized upon hover inside of tables at least.

Just came across this today as I was trying to move some process documentation into Bear. A lot of it included server names and files paths. It’s annoying because the auto link detection is breaking the leading double slashes. And then even when fixed - having that pen icon in the middle of a path makes it hard to read

When I copy in:

\\server.subdomain.domain\path\path\path\somefile.txt

Bear transforms it into

\~[server.subdomain.domain](http://server.subdomain.domain/)~\path\path\path\somefile.txt
^ This string is the literal result of me pasting in the first string, then selecting it and copying it back out after Bear has auto-transformed it.

2 Likes

If anyone is still here, I would also like to format .com strings as plain text. For example, I made a note that I had changed an email address to a website. I don’t want to keep flying off on the link to that website or the “.com” portion of the email address from clicking by mistake. So, I changed the strings to “dot-com” which seems like a lame workaround.

There are two ways to fix this:

  1. Add the backslash \ (escape character) before the @ like: my.name\@gmail.com
    or backslash before dots in URLs, like: bbc\.co\.uk
    It will display in regular text font, like this: my.name@gmail.com or bbc.co.uk
  2. Use backticks (inline code) around the email or URL: `my.name@gmail.com` or `bbc.co.uk`
    It will display like this: my.name@gmail.com or bbc.co.uk (in mono space code font)

Hope that will work for you :slight_smile: