Editing a note’s Creation/Modification dates would be incredibly useful. Believe it or not, the ability to edit “creation date” is one of the reasons Evernote is my primary app for archiving documents and receipts.
My primary use case involves scanning statements and receipts with my SnapScan scanner. Modifying the date manually allows me to match the creation date to the document’s date when I scan older documents.
Also, another post from two years ago asks for a way to edit the creation/modification date via API (URL scheme, scripting/shortcuts), so maybe these can be combined in some way. The ability to do this via an API would open up many possibilities for automating the import of documents.
As a workaround so far, you can start title of your note with date (e.g. “(240721) This is scan of…” or use date tag (#24/07/01). ) Of course, you can further create various shortcuts/macros to make it (changing/creating date in title or tag) even smoother.
After working with Bear for the last few months, I’ve come to realize that to effectively sort my notes by “creation date,” I need to start every title with a date in the format “YYYY.MM.DD” (e.g., 2024.09.11). This workaround is necessary until we have the ability to modify the “created” date of a note.
While I initially also requested the ability to modify the “modification date,” I believe that just being able to change the “creation date” would be sufficient and far more valuable.
Is there any possibility of this feature being implemented soon? This is the one missing feature that’s holding me back from fully transitioning to Bear as my primary note-taking system.
Changing the creation and modification dates in Bear is more complex than it seems. These dates hold important metadata crucial for features like syncing, which is why they aren’t user-editable. While it’s technically possible to allow changes in the future, we haven’t yet found a reliable way to maintain smooth functionality while granting access to this data.
@Claire_Bear I think that Bear’s advanced tagging system and reliance on tags as an organizational tool makes it especially important to think a lot about modification and creation dates particularly as they relate to organization and sorting.
The issue that I’m facing is that I have many thousands of notes that all need similar edits:
Updated H1 titles to match the current title system that I’ve already been using for a while
Structured tags, separated from the note body by a HR separator, including nested date tags - none of which are currently present in the notes themselves
Minor edits to spelling and grammar (less important)
Most of these notes are many years old, and I have thousands of newer notes. If I go through and make these edits en masse, then the old notes will completely overwhelm all the new/current/ongoing notes in my collection.
Some possibilities:
Option to make edits on a note, then manually override the modification date to what it previously was
Option to temporarily turn off modification-date updating, then turn it back on when I’m done
Option to revert a note’s metadata to its previous modification date
Option to export a subset of notes, manually update their titles and tags in another app, then re-import them into Bear while maintaining the old modification dates
I just need some kind of way to handle it, or else Bear breaks down as a system, despite doing more or less exactly what I need.
I’d love it if you could just edit the Creation Date, but not bothered about altering when a note was updated. As per the OP I used the Evernote feature to modify the Creation Date of a Note so I can see them in some sort of timeline. When importing to Bear that goes out the window, although I guess it will settle down for future notes.
@Claire_Bear can you have a secondary field that is user facing rather then combining the sync modification concern with the user’s modification date concern. It sounds like the sync modification date needs to be burred into internal logic and another field initially cloned from it, needs to be the one that the user uses in search and can be modified.
There are additionally some actions that change the modification date but are not really modification actions on the note. Such as re-naming a tag. Or adding/removing a tag. Such actions should probably not change the modification date if the tag doesn’t appear in the body of the content – such as at the end of a note.
Being able to change creation dates would be a game-changer for me. It’s my ONLY complaint with Bear, several months after going all-in.
@Claire_Bear take a look at how Supernotes handles this. They have what they call a “Targeted Date” which defaults to the creation date (which itself is read-only). You can override the Targeted Date on any note, and then sort by that field. Schema-wise this seems similar to what @AdamT proposed above, except with both the “internal” created-at and “user-facing” dates exposed. Personally I didn’t find much utility in seeing both Created and Targeted dates in Supernotes and would suggest allowing (what seems like) direct modification of the created date in the UI instead.
I’m in the same boat as @weborican – I’m using a date prefix on all my notes, but I’d like to not be tied to this in the future. I don’t see much utility in being able to change modified dates, because since “touching” a note sets the modified date to now, it’s a “brittle” piece of metadata. Whereas created dates wouldn’t change unless I explicitly change them.
Another +1 on this. I also have thousands of notes. If I update an old note the modification date gets updated and exactly as @esential_gentle describes it bumps to the top of my list. An example is I was linking to a 5 year old note with an embedded pdf. It did not have “show preview” checked and so I changed that to make the note easier to read. I would love to be able to change the modification date back to what it was. Dates for me carry information as this note is clustered around other notes written around the same time providing context and depth. When the modification date changed, I lost all that context. I like the suggestion that the bear team could decouple the modified date used for syncing from the modified date used for user display, sorting, etc. The user display modified date would always be updated whenever the sync / internal modified date changed, but the user would be able to update the user display modified date which would impact sorting.
