The new editor looks exciting! I have noticed that there is already a lot of feedback on headings, some of it is the complete opposite of what I’m about to say, so I thought I’d share my view.
For me the core principle of a markdown editor is that it allows me to write and edit markdown. This means that it shouldn’t be hiding things from me. The simplest plain text editors, like TextEdit.app, do this perfectly (even if they don’t have a clue about syntax highlighting, to me that is only a secondary feature).
Bear does the right thing in almost every case:
Everything I highlighted can be edited like any other character in the document – except headings*. When you have a heading, you can’t turn a ## into a ### like in a plain text editor. That means I can’t edit a markdown document like I’m used to – I’m now writing in a markdown dialect. The current version (1.x) has a hybrid approach – it lets you add and remove # characers, but in the end the experience was far from what you get when editing plain text (I totally understand why the new version is abandoning that approach). In my opinion, you can’t beat the straightforwardness of adding or removing a single plain text character.
I wanted to share my feedback on this, but I’m also curious to hear what the editor’s makers philosophy is.
*I know there are other exceptions: bullets do the same thing, but they don’t bother me too much, as you can easily backspace through them as you would throguh plain text. Tables are another exception, but again I don’t mind, as they are not part of the markdown spec.
