Separating notes into individual writing environments is one of the most requested features in Bear, and we understand how useful it would be to keep #work and #personal notes separated. We shared some early concepts with you a while ago, received a lot of great feedback, and now Workspace is ready to meet you all in beta.
Workspace lets you turn any tag into a dedicated writing environment. When a tag is set as your Workspace, Bear shows only the notes under that tag, and the Sidebar updates to show only the related tags. Search results and Sidebar entries such as Archive and Trash all follow the same filter.
Right-click any tag in the Sidebar and select “Use as Workspace.” To switch between Workspaces or go back to all notes, click the double arrow icon next to the tag name at the top of the Sidebar.
It would be really nice if my tag that is a workspace would auto expand when going to that workspace. I have it collapsed when in main view but for the workspace it just makes sense I think to expand it otherwise you can’t see any of your tags apart from the one for your workspace.
A keyboard shortcut to switch workspaces would be nice as well.
Wow! This is by far the most unobtrusive, elegant, and simple implementation imaginable. And I’m so glad that the socalled external tags are displayed as well. I’m going to have a lot of fun with this. I can’t thank you enough!
I like the concept but it’s unclear in the list which is a workspace amongst the recent. I don’t want to change my tag name so would it be possible to have tags promoted to a workspace to appear in a separate section of the drop down?
The ticket is displayed as open or closed, depending on its status before it was choosen as workspace. I on the other hand would like it if a closed tag is displayed as closed in the workspace. I’m primarily interested in the context that appears in the so-called external tags. In that regard the part of your post that I highlighted in bold in the quote is incorrect as long as your workspace contain tags outside of the focused tag..
@IanT
It’s hard for me to understand what you mean. Can you repeat that in other words?
Yeah that is the problem say I go to my personal workspace and expand personal tag, then go to my work workspace and expand the tag as soon as I go back to personal its collapsed again because other top level tags are collapsed when you open another. This is really annoying when you want to swap from one workspace to the other and you constantly have to keep expanding the tag.
I have set up three workspaces personal, work, professional. When I am in one such as work as below (photo 2) the drop down menu shows work visible as the chosen workspace.
If I want to change workspaces, then the only way to do so (I think) is expand the dropdown menu and choose from recent (photo 1)? In this state it doesn’t tell you what is a normal tag and what is a workspace. Could we have a separate section in this dropdown where workspaces are ‘pinned’ by default?
In some specific cases, the tag tree in the sidebar of a workspace does not update when tags are deleted from a note and therefore doesn’t belong anymore to the workspace
Calling the section in the context menu where “Notes” is located “Workspace” is very misleading. It practically invites the misunderstanding that you can create additional entries within that same section. I was confused at first too. Otherwise it’s an elegant solution to link favorites in the context menu to the “pinned” status.
As always, you came up with a great design! I originally thought of this feature only as a way to separate personal and work notes, but the current implementation lets you explore new workflows and notes organization models. It’s so easy to switch between tags that it is even useful for reducing clutter when exploring under a specific subtag.
That said, until Workspace comes to the web version it won’t help me much with the personal/work separation, but it will already be useful for these other things!
Super excited about this! I see myself using this a ton and my first impressions of this are great
A few bits of feedback: 1. I have two main areas I will use as workspaces: personal and work
Throughout the day, I switch between these two areas quite a bit.
The current implementation allows me to operate within the given workspace in a very clean way (Very happy about that!) It is, however, a bit laborious to quickly toggle between the two.
If I could save or pin workspaces to access quickly–just like I can pin tags and notes that I need to access easily–that could perhaps solve the issue.
2. I was quite confused by “Notes” being the default view/workspace. They’re all notes to me, so that label indicating the top-level view wasn’t clear to me.
Hmm. We can’t have two tags designated as Workspaces? If I select my “personal” tag as a workspace, and then do the same for “work”, I have to re-choose “personal” as Workspace to get back to that functionality?
Also, my understanding is that only the tags associated with the current workspace—tags nested under “personal”—would be shown in the left sidebar. But in my case the sidebar doesn’t change…the root tag and all sub tags under “work” are still shown in the sidebar, even though I’m in my “personal” workspace. Am I missing something? (Or are only the tags created after using the workspace feature part of the new filtered sidebar view?)
