I am using a Bear-centric way of adding due dates to tasks: " - submit feedback on project X #due/2022/10/05 ". This works relatively well as they are very fast to create and they generate a calendar in the left pane from which you can find all of the tasks across notes that may be due that day. However, a more customized view of this structure would be an amazing addition to Bear.
With my current workaround, the interface is annoying, as a single date is nested 4 tags deep and takes several button clicks to access. The search function is also annoying, as you have to type out the whole date in order to get notes due on that day, and have to do that multiple times to see due dates for the next 3 days, for example, through a search like: #due/2022/10/05 OR #due/2022/10/06 OR #due/2022/10/07… Tedious. This structure also means I can’t use tags that are numbers, because all of the 1-31 numbers are already used as tags for the date structure.
What we be amazing would be if Bear internalized all of this cumbersome nested date data structure and provided a simpler UI for dates in general. It would be nice to have an overview of, for example, all the todos in the coming week. Ideally, when you click on Todo in the tags pane, you could be able to see the notes not in order of their title or modification date, but rather in order of the #due/2022/10/ etc. date. In other words, instead of a simple list of notes, it would be a structured list, with headings for each upcoming day (for any todo that has a date associated with it). That way I could drop the entirely cumbersome nesting of due dates that are listed as tags, gain back my ability to use numbers as tags, and gain the ability to add due dates to tasks.
I think that would be very consistent with Bear’s workflow, as the user would simply and quickly type dates without any button clicks. The simplest implementation would be a new handle, like the exclamation mark. So instead of #due/2022/10/5, it would be simply !10/5. Bear would then just need to parse the string, so as to merge all possible date formats that users would throw at it: !10/05, !10/5, !2022/10/05, !10-05 etc. into a single date. In the tags view, Bear could just have a calendar icon, and have Dates as another view, just as it has Todo and Today at present. That would be super simple and very flexible. In my case, I would add the !10/05 into my tasks to create a ToDo list with due dates, but I could see someone else using it to label other dates not associated with tasks as well. In my case, I would click on Dates, and then narrow by searching @Todos. Alternatively, I could click on Todos and then search @Dates.
In other words, the Panda editor would simply add the symbol ! to mark a date, which would work very much like a tag with an implied, nested, date data structure, for which Bear could provide a simple UI. Doing that would allow rapid creation of dates in notes; remain highly flexible for all different types of use cases; hide all of the confusing parts about ISO formats behind a very simple UI; and effectively provide Bear with the functionality of a basic Todo manager in the same way as, for example, Evernote has done (with just 4-6 button clicks!). I think that would be an amazing addition to enable better overview and access to what is in Bear without changing the UI significantly or having too much feature bloat!
Thanks for reading and potentially considering the idea.