Just a quick note to say I’m hoping for comment support!
Use case: I use Lettera for various creative writing projects (MFA student, poetry, short stories, novel chapters, etc). Comments are useful both for notes to self (when did I write this, etc) and reminders of things I want to edit.
I know this is technically possible with HTML comments, but something quicker to type would be lovely.
You could use footnotes.
I use this type of comment in articles I write. Lettera colors them a bit differently (though a color option would be nice; I might want something that is not bluish-gray).
<!--
comment
-->
Or sometimes:
COMMENT
Or you can use plain text and highlight it.
Also you could use that trick. In any case I would also appreciate if Bear would follow the existing convention of enclosing comments in percent signs.
I would want comments to be as cross-compatible as possible with other apps. The advantage of
<!--
this sort of comment
-->
is that most text editors that are designed to read code, and do syntax coloring, recognize it and show it differently.
If you don’t need compatibility, and it’s just for you, then anything will work. I think highlighting comments with colors is a good way to make them really stand out.
Me too. Therefore I asked for the percent-sign-markup as it became by convention a standard.
AFAIK only Obsidian and Ulysses support this natively and in different ways (block vs. inline). And even Ulysses is a bit of an outlier because you can set your own markdown syntax to whatever you want.
I’m not against (I like %% because it’s simple) but it’s far from standard and far from what you’d typically see supported in text editors beyond the two mentioned.
It’s not a standard anyway, but rather a convention. Much of what we have in Bear stems from such conventions. The CommonMark specification itself doesn’t include tables, underlines or strikethroughs, wiki links, footnotes, callouts, or to-do lists. GitHub Flavored Markdown has added some of these, but not all of them.
If Bear would adopt the percent signs for comments, it would strengthen what I’ve called a convention.
I realize that HTML commenting is already pretty much a standard. But seriously: It’s 2026, Markdown has a long history behind it and in some cases has taken turns that John Gruber would view with skepticism. Many people who use Markdown today didn’t even know what it was a few years ago. And they don’t care that Markdown was once a format meant to be converted to HTML. It’s a general writing format for them that’s becoming increasingly popular and has drifted away from its origins. In that sense, simplicity is indeed a strong argument in favor of using the percent sign.
My point was that %% is known and understood as ‘comment’ to the Obsidian PKM community and very few outside of that, e.g. GitHub—which carries a significant bulk of raw markdown generated and shared on the web today—is oblivious to what the double percent sign means. OTOH, HTML comments are understood by almost every processor there is. You’re more likely to see /* or // than %%.
Therefore, if I use Lettera to write markdown that will eventually get converted to something else / published, I would expect the app to conform comments to what is supported and understood outside of the app itself. That doesn’t mean we can’t have shortcuts.
I use Obsidian and I wasn’t aware of that convention for comments. I have been writing articles in Markdown for 15 years, and have always used either HTML style comments or all caps or highlighted text.
The advantage of HTML style comments in iA Writer is that they don’t get counted in the word count and they are dimmed. Comments in Bbedit get counted no matter how you do it; and their default method is using a # before text. Bbedit also uses HTML style comments, if your document is set to Markdown.