Observations & Desires for Bear 2

This is my first round with the Bear 2 beta, these are my initial observations.

Big performance improvements over Bear 1.x

I’m really impressed with how much faster it is than Bear 1, all the lag I had scrolling through notes or when editing large web-clipped notes is gone.

It’s a very noticeable improvement.

Formatting / Editor

I really like that the markup symbols are less noisy, in Bear 1 I found all the formatting markup distracting and blew out the size of my notes, in addition this makes clipped web pages easier to read.

For the longest time with Bear 1, having - dashes create checkboxes rather than lists infuriated me - glad to see this is fixed with the new editor.


Desires

These are some things I would love to see.

  • Table of Contents
    • There needs to be a way to insert a generated ToC. This is something that’s incredibly useful in Markdown files and is offered either natively or via plugins in most editors/IDEs.
  • Toolbar
    • I welcome the new “styles” bar, I think this could be made full width with customisable buttons / shortcuts, ideally it would be pinable to the top for the editor.
  • Customisable keyboard shortcuts
    • It would be great if we could map the keyboard shortcuts, especially things like “paste as… <plain text, from html, etc…>”
  • Fonts
    • System installed fonts should be made available, this is important for people with specific visual needs.
  • Images
    • I’d like to be able to right click on an image and open it in an editor (e.g. Pixelmator Pro/Preview/whatever), this would be especially useful for resizing, compressing images clipped using the Bear web clipper.
  • Code Blocks
    • It would be great if you could set the code block colour scheme separate from the theme.
  • Tags
    • It would be good if we could reduce the font size of the tags and the left padding on them, at the moment they take up quite a bit of screen realestate for the value they add.
  • Margins
    • There needs to be way to set the margin sizes / page width.
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This has not been implemented yet. This will be possible when the Bear 2.0 is finished.

Your edits with those apps does not show back on Bear. (You are opening a copy of the image, not the original so unless this behaviour change, I don’t think the action would be useful) Also, resizing of the image is possible through the triangular thing at the right bottom of the image when you hover over.

This has not been implemented yet.

You can do some of that in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts.

I made one for Format > Todo: Move Done to Bottom

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Oh that’s awesome, thanks Brian!

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I noticed people asking for generated ToC might have different ideas in mind:

  • The TOC is just copied somewhere in the note but it’s just plain MD and doesn’t update if you update the note.
  • As the above but the TOC automatically updates. This is something very complex and we replicate the functionality we have in the info panel.
  • A {{TOC}} tag that automatically generated the TOC when the note is exported.

This is something for the future but at the moment we don’t intend to provide a customizable toolbar.

We want to re-introduce B1 “open with” panel at some point but I have to check how it works on Ventura first.

We don’t want to separate the code block colors from the rest of the theme but, at some point, we’ll have a theme editor that will allow choosing code block colors.

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Out of curiosity: are you thinking of a seperate tool that creates installable themes or rather settings inside of bears preferences?

To edit/create the theme it can be either but at some point, you have to “import” your theme in Bear so I’m more inclined to an in-app tool.

I am eager to see how ugly my themes will be :grin:
People like to play around and be non productive, me either. What do you think about an official place on bears site where themes can be published for downloading?

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Eventually yes if people are interested in publishing themes why not.

Or interested in downloading good ones :grin: