I love Bear and I’ve been a an on-and-off user (more on than off) for a really long time. Yet, because of some missing features I sometimes find myself trying other note-taking apps.
Its simplicity is something I really appreciate but, at the same time, I’m afraid sometimes the team behind Bear pushes it a bit too far. I think some additional “improvements” can be made without sacrificing the user experience and still keeping Bear the smoothness app out there.
My wish list, starting with the most pressing items:
Non-created wiki links
Allow users to differentiate wiki link pages that have already being created from pages that still don’t exist.
I often create wiki links for concepts I want to explore later but then, some time later, I find myself clicking on them hoping to read their content.
Reducing the opacity of wiki links that are not created yet should be enough.
Mark tasks as in-progress
I know Bear is not a task manager, but I’m sure I’m not the only one that uses it to store lists of items for projects or trips.
While it’s possible to mark tasks as in-progress using markdown [/], I understand it’s a lot more difficult to implement with taps and clicks.
An option would be to add this behaviour to checklist items:
- Long press to mark as in-progress
- Click on an in-progress task to mark as complete
- Normal click on an open task marks it as complete, so nothing changes for users who don’t want to. use it
Saved searches
Allow users to save searches and pin them somewhere (to the sidebar?).
Right now I have a note where I saved my most frequent searches but this feels too much like a workaround.
If you’re worried that the sidebar would become too overcrowded, allow users to customise it. There are some voices there that I doubt most people use.
Improve the Archive
Allow users to navigate the Archive using tags that exist in it.
Basically, replace the list of tags with the ones that exist only in the Archive.
Workspaces
I’d love to use Bear for all my note but, at the same time, I don’t want to filter them for -#work every day after 5pm.
A lot of other note-taking apps do this and I think this would really take Bear to the next level.
Automatically lint files
I like Bear because it’s clean, beautiful and consistent. I want my notes to be the same, and I spend way too much time making sure there’s 1 space between titles and paragraphs, or between paragraphs and lists.
Simply add a checkbox to the preferences so that Bear can lint files “on save”.
Adhering to markdown best-practices should be enough, but additionally you could allow users to customise it to their preferences.
I think these are all requests that make sense and I hope the team will take them into consideration.
Update: Added “Mark tasks as in progress”