One feature which I really appreciate in Drafts, NotePlan, Obsidian, and programming-oriented editors is having an always-available “quick switcher” interface.
This is particularly valuable on iOS, where navigating away from a current context to get to the main list, do a search, and select an item, is several extra steps and significantly increases friction.
For comparison, see in particular Drafts on iOS:
Pulling down in any regular editor view (like for a “pull to refresh” gesture) brings up a quick switcher search box, and allows immediately jumping elsewhere in your database of drafts.
I am going to revive this. Ability to quickly switch between notes is an essential feature for Bear and would really help in the ‘writing’ factor of Bear while quickly moving through notes in Bear. The ideal implementation would be to as belows… a really simple switcher, but. also the ability to switch to tags as well. Hope this gets implemented in Bear!!
Similar feature is found in a lot of notetaking apps. This one is in IA Writer. This is different than search feature.
1 i think this would be a really great feature and I love iaWriters implementation as another poster noted. Personally for me, as a knowledge worker, the CMD + K/O paradigm is so ingrained in apps now that I instinctively look for it in any app.
+1 This would be super handy to switch between multiple documents. I regularly use bear with three or four documents open and having another option to quick switch without a mouse would be a real time saver.
+1 for this. If anyone has any tips on the best way to switch between notes pls lmk. Right now cmd + shift + f then searching feels very clunky e.g. seeing results that contain the search term in the document body. Or sometimes the note I want isn’t the first hit so I have to manually select the note etc.
Alfred worfklow (Bear by drgrib) is exactly that “quick switcher”, although not implemented directly in Bear. I highly recommend it, it was recently updated for Bear 2.0
I LOVE using command palettes in apps. Sublime Text and Merge, VS Code, Jetbrains IDE’s, etc. I second the idea that a note title quick switcher would be amazing. I also use the Alfred workflow mentioned and it works great.
I think that a very good implementation could be something similar to what is found in Things 3:
ex. With CMD+O a hover window appears, allowing:
Switch to a Tag (Tag becomes selected)
Switch to a Note (Note becomes open)
This could be either a very minimal implentation (just a rectangle. like Things3) or feature some additional information (list entries show also image previews, like in Craft Docs).
Just commenting to say this feature would be pretty cool! There is soooorta something like it through the Search feature, but the Search feature–although wonderful at what it does–is limited to searching within whatever is your current tag/folder. It will often break up my flow.
This would also be great for linking documents and connecting everything up quickly.
Don’t know if it’s possible to implement, but if there is a way, it’d be wonderful!
Things quick switcher is indeed a great model. One thing I would note is that, unlike cmd-shift-f to activate search, there should be a modifier (holding down cmd or shift or similar) while selecting an item that causes it to open in a new window, rather than necessarily redirecting the current window. I have this with Raycast, and use it constantly, but it really feels like something Bear should have natively (and should therefore also be on iOS/iPad, too, where things like Raycast can’t solve the problem).
I love the quick switcher from Obidian, Evernote, Figma, etc.
Please bring this feature to Bear!
We can switch between specific documents via keyboard which dramatically increases the sense of flow while using an application.