Feature request: make it possible to have *some* kind of bullet or indicator in the gutter

In the last few days around here I’ve been vocal about not wanting bullets (and quote indicators, I’ve discovered) to be inline. I like them in the gutter because it makes those lines clearly stand out. I do, however, recognize that this is not the behavior most people want, and had I not had it from the beginning, I would have never noticed.

HOWEVER, I have come to depend on the bullets and quote indicators being in the gutter. Almost everything I do in Bear uses those gutter-aligned bullets to make certain things stand out. I use those gutter-aligned bullets to “make notes in the margins” indicating what’s important.

SO, I’m here to be part of the solution, not part of the problem, and make a suggestion: I would like to see a feature that allows users to deliberately add a mark of some kind in the gutter.

If there’s a way I can do this on purpose, it won’t bother me that the behavior of the bullets and quote indicators has changed (other than the fact that I’m going to have to edit hundreds of Bear documents once my gutter-bullets are moved inline by this update).

Maybe CMD+OPT+S to create a star symbol in the gutter, or something akin to that. I’d actually prefer something like a bullet, but maybe one that’s twice the size of the normal bullet?

But the upshot is, I need the ability to make a mark in the gutter.

3 Likes

Hi there,

I can empathize a lot with this, I was the one who pushed for having hanging marks (headers, list bullets, quotes) in the gutter. Unfortunately, the world seems to be not ready for that as we received so much feedback that in the end, we decided to align everything in a more “standard way”.

While your idea of having some kind of markers in the gutter is interesting we don’t have a practical way to implement it. The foundation of this new editor is CommonMark, a very good and defined specification for Markdown, and we’re striving to keep all the features as much as possible conforming to that.

I know that my explanation won’t make you happy, but I hope that our reasoning does make sense and that this new direction is understandable.

Best.

OK, given that, I’d like to make another request: Allow the Line Width setting to go all the way to the edges of the window. Currently, the widest you can go still leaves ~95px gutters on either side in Editor Only view.

If the quotes and bullets are moving inward, that means all the text on those lines is moving inward too. As I said said in my post about the line widths in Panda, I often compose in a way that specifically avoids text-wrapping in my bullets — and that’s very much dependent on how wide Line Width can be. If the bullets move inward by roughly the width of a [TAB], it’s going to result in thousands of lines all throughout my Bear notes becoming textwrapped when I deliberately wrote them juuuust short enough to not textwrap.

So if I can make text width a tad wider than it can be now — if I’m not stuck with those 3/4" gutters on either side — I’ll be able to fix that problem everywhere with a tiny click-and-drag in Settings, rather than having to spend hours (days?) editing probably 85% of my notes.

Cheers!

BTW, I’m still disappointed that this is such a big deal for people. I mean, how hard is it to just hit [TAB] one more time when you don’t want your bullet in the gutter?

I know this may not be the solution you are looking for but I find the -> arrow to be helpful, even if it’s within the margins of the text, to distinguish from regular bullet points as something to pay attention to and to heighten it use the ::highlighter:: such that your new indicator is ::->::
Again, it’s not in the margin but very visible at the edge of text, or wherever in the document.

Hadn’t thought about ::->:: — that’s definitely enough to draw the eye. Not as neat and clean, but I suppose it’s better than nothing. I just think it’s really helpful to be able to “make notes in the margins” rather than cluttering up my text.

Thanks for the idea.