Apologies if this has been brought up before. I presume when Panda is incorporated back into Bear that we’ll lose the individual file-per-note paradigm of Panda and revert to the sqlite structure of Bear. Regardless, two of the many really nice features of this Panda editor are the ability (1) to have multiple notes open in a tab structure, and (2) to see the note title no matter how far down one may have scrolled in a long(ish) note.
I’m curious if either of those aspects (tabs and/or persistent note titles) from Panda will find themselves implemented in the Bear+Panda framework?
The plan for Bear at the moment does not include these two features.
However, due to customer feedback, after the implementation of Panda into Bear, we are thinking about keeping Panda as a standalone Editor. If this happens, both of these will still be available in Panda.
That would be terrific. A few additional elements of the Panda editor that I think are incredibly helpful include:
The ability not to see all notes and yet still be able to open any note (in Bear, once the search menu is exposed, the user is forced to see a list of all notes)
Related, the clearable list of Recent notes is quite useful
To easily switch between viewing notes as individual windows or merging all into a single tabbed structure
Visually appealing note header that makes window dragging far easier than Bear (in Bear, note scrolling scrolls text right off the top of the window - which is a bit awkward when trying to drag a note window).
So yeah, if there was a way to utilize the Panda editor with full “Bear-functionality” (note linking, tagging, inter and intra-note searching, etc.) that would be superb.
Thank you for the additional feedback, and for providing your viewpoint. We find all the feedback on this forum useful, especially when considering our direction for the future!
I don’t think tabs make sense for Bear - it just doesn’t fit the UI “flow”. But for Panda (as a standalone editor) it makes perfect sense. And the team’s implementation of that thus far is quite nice.
What I do think could be helpful in Bear though would be some of the other “UI” aspects of Panda including:
A note header (with the note title). As it is now, Bear notes have no header. So if you have your main H1 (title) scrolled off the page, which of course is true for every long-ish note you write, then you have no idea which note you’re editing (if you had multiple Bear notes open, which is often the case).
With such a note header comes a draggable area by default. Today, if you have a Bear note with text scrolled near the top, then to move that window, you are essentially grabbing an area of the note with body copy. It is an awkward user experience, not to mention that a mouse click is often picked up as “oh you want to edit here” and not the expected “oh, you’re clicking here to drag the window”.
The ability to open notes without needing to look at your ENTIRE list of notes. As it is now in Bear, if you Shift-Cmd-F (to open “global find”), the Notes pane opens and you are presented with EVERY. SINGLE. NOTE. in your “vault”. I think some sort of “open” or “find” dialog/popup that allows the user to type in text and show only the found results (or create new page) would be quite nice. You get that by default with Panda because it uses basic file system features (e.g. Cmd-O). Granted, file system “open” and “find” not all that attractive, but it gets the job done. And you aren’t presented with all your notes - just the ones in whichever folder you’ve most recently worked in - which is another super helpful productivity thing.
So, long-winded way of saying I have stepped away from believing Bear should implement tabs but I do think there are several other UI aspects of Panda that would be super nice additions to Bear.