A hint how to write comments in bear without a dedicated markup

[krssno]

I found here (see the first answer) a hint how to write comments (by abusing a special form of markdown links) in a way I always desired. I don’t know why it works but it works at least in bear. In obsidian however I was not able to achieve the same satisfying result. Here how it look likes:

Three important criteria are met:

1. You can choose your own markup signs that will be visible. I have chosen the non obstrusive double slash but you can take whatever you want, for example: text like “Comment:” or an emoji. It’s a bit of a shame that the colon appears, but hey, who wants to be that picky?

2. The comment appears in a paler colour and therefore is immediately recognizable as a commentary.

3. But above all - and this is the decisive factor - the comment is not transferred when exporting to another format.

How to achieve that?

After clicking inside the comment you will see the required syntax. Here a screenshot:

As you can see the comment goes into the round brackets. Into the square brackets you can place as said your own text, emoji or signs that signals that a comment is going to come.

To make the experience perfect go to your macOS settings into keyboard and then text substitution. Here you can define a trigger that would write automatically the syntax: “[//]: <> ()”. As I always use @-sign for all my text substitutions I took “@//”.

However the macOS own text substitution will place the cursor after the last round bracket. With the app “rocket typist” I was able to place the cursor inside the round brackets. Similar apps will surely allow that too.

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Addendum

A colon inside the square brackets gives the visual most pleasing look:

[Pdxpectations]

Neat trick. Thanks for sharing !!

[mlw]

For a portable and markdown spec compatible version of comments just use html comment tags

<!-- Comments go here and can span
  
Multiple paragraphs 

These are compatible with most markdown editors and exporters
-->

[danmills7]

@krssno

[//]: <> ()

Awesome! I will definitely be using this. I opted for a single “/“.

[krssno]

Of course you can use this HTML syntax to mark a comment as such. However, this does not fulfill the one crucial expectation of a comment: namely that the comment is not included in the export

@krssno

But above all - and this is the decisive factor - the comment is not transferred when exporting to another format.

[mlw]

You’re right. Read the post later. Very nice hack

[oziade]

Great trick, thanks!

Multiline works but text formatting and bullet points do not.
I suppose it is due to Markdown syntax.

[krssno]

Yes, probably. But for comments that limitation is acceptable, especially since the commentary comes in a paler color anyway. Another limitation is that inline comments are not possible