What feature did you use:
Selected text, then clicked the “Link” option from the formatting dropdown in the window chrome
What happened:
A pop-up showed up with the “Title” field pre-filled with the selected text and the “Address” field empty. I clicked “Done” without filling out the “Address” field which put [title]() into the editor, as I expected. The problem happened when I moved my cursor inside the parentheses to manually type in a URL. After typing the first character the chain link icon was shown and I was not able to see what I was typing.
What did you expect to happen:
I expected to be able to type a URL and see what I was typing.
This is to be expected, that’s how our links works. If you want to see the URL while editing in the editor you need to delete the parenthesis [title](some url|
After @matteo explained it, that makes sense. However, I have to agree with @jacob that this is not what I expected. I am not sure how it could be improved, but it is strange that you can affect the URL without seeing what you are typing…
After playing around with this some more I still feel like there should be a change here. In the hopes that it might help I’ve got three alternative approaches to suggest.
Always put the link icon between the parentheses when creating a link, even if the URL field is left empty. This way the user has something to click to get the link popover. If you want to differentiate empty links, make it a broken link icon (if you do that though it may lead into trying to validate all links in order to show broken vs non-broken link icon, so may open a can of worms that isn’t worth it).
Internally detect the situation where a URL is being typed between two parentheses that previously had no value inside it, and in that particular case hold off on replacing the URL with the link icon until the cursor leaves or moves past the closing parentheses. This would make the experience pretty much the same as typing a URL in a new link (where the URL is fully visible until the closing parentheses is added).
I don’t think this one really fits in with your design, but for completeness: when the cursor is to the left or right of the link icon, expand the actual text of the URL in place of the link icon. A lot of other editors do this kind of thing, but it causes text to jump around and Bear seems to avoid this pattern in general.
It seems to me to be an issue worth fixing that if I have text like this [title]() there is really no good way for me to type a URL into that parentheses. Either I have to delete the closing parentheses before typing the URL, or I need to type something random, which gets me the link icon, which I can then click to get the popover, clear out whatever I typed, and type in the correct URL.
All that said, leaving it as-is isn’t the end of the world or anything. But I figure if you have a dedicated beta just for the editor you want it to be as good as it can be!
EDIT: I realize this is in “Bug Reports” which my request clearly isn’t at this point, so sorry about that. Don’t know if you can move it to a different category.