I use Bear to organise some personal thoughts, and recently I decided to write a series of newsletters and maybe a book sometimes. Right now, keeping everything in the Bear is quite challenging because the searches and the tags are entirely different and became difficult when they mix.
Do you plan to implement multiple projects/agendas with completely different tags and individual searches and so on, like two different accounts but with the option to change between them?
Unpopular opinion: Bear’s tags are so powerful that they are the only classification mechanism we need. When apps start adding first-class support for projects and folders and labels it bloats the interface and makes the app less usable.
I manage workspaces in Bear by using hierarchical tags, for example, a “#w/” prefix for work stuff, a “#p/” prefix for personal stuff. To “switch” to my personal workspace, I click on the top-level “p” tag in the first column. To search within my personal workspace if I’m not already “in” it, I simply add “#p” to the search term.
This also lets me do things that I can’t do in apps that have explicit workspace support. I can search in multiple workspaces (“#w1 or #w2 foo”). I can search in all workspaces except for the ones I specifically say to ignore (“-#w1 -#w2 foo”). Etc.
In your use of Bear you can be completely happy with only one workspace.
Others can need more differentiation and will like different workspaces for “work”, “home”, “language study”, “culinary”, “second life”, etc.
Each workspace with his own database, tags and password protection.
I totally disagree. While bears tags are indeed powerful the lack of workspaces forces me at creation of tag tree system to consider that I am in danger to mess up the whole tag tree. Different topics require different tagging. Cooking recipes, a book to write, university stuff, private notes and so on require different tagging. That results in a messing up of left sidebar that is more annoying than the few ui elements for managing/opening workspaces that absolutely would not add complexity to bear if implemented properly. Rather than that it would decrease complex tag structures
Nobody asked for replacing tags with workspaces. If one workspace is enough for you then you could keep using that one without being confronted with a less usable app
There are some downsides to having a single workspace regardless.
more noise in note names: you might have several notes with the same title pertaining to different contexts; you have more notes in general so finding the right one is more difficult (e.g., when trying to create a wikilink), etc.
worse performance: larger databases = worse performance. Having several separate databases would fix that.
compliance/privacy issues: some employers don’t allow mixing private and work stuff, and/or spy on you while using your work computer. So if you only have one workspace, your employer can read all your private notes
These three I came up with off the top of my head. There are more scenarios like that which you can’t fix with hierarchical tagging.
I agree with @wmesard that multi-workspace feature duplicates nested-tags feature.
I believe “duplicated note names” and “worse performance” issues could be solved even without introducing multiple workspaces.
Even worse, you can also encounter those issues within a single large workspace project, e.g. when you writing a book. You wouldn’t want to create workspace for every chapter of your book.
Interesting discussion, talk you everyone for your replies.
I see those things like different physical agendas, so you would probably use different agendas for work and one for personal projects; even if you can use the same agenda half for personal use and the other half for professional use.
I would use the same principle here. In terms of issues, I agree that is a problem of privacy (you don’t want to share your screen with personal stuff in a business meeting), and also an improvement in terms of focusing (one project - one agenda).
I absolutely have no clue how can be solved what I have mentioned. Apart from that: Nobody is forced to use more than one workspace. Those who wants to use more than one exactly know their reasons
For me it seems that you indeed do not need multiple workspaces if and just if you tag each note with just one and only tag. But using multiple tags inside notes is a different thing.
For duplicated names: maybe wiki links should allow full path e.g. [[work/project1/subtag:note1]]
For performance: depending on what we’re talking about, there’re different approaches
I’m thinking in terms of direction of development of Bear. If multi-workspace becomes the official way to deal with note names clutter, then those who prefer single-workspace wouldn’t get solution for the same issue for their way of working with notes (names clutter may occur in a single big project).
Anyway, I’m not strongly against multi-workspace, just my 5 cents why opposite approach might be fine too.
