For me, note interlinking is one of the most important features of Bear. The fact that Bear works within a database makes it incredibly easy to work with links, and if I create a link [[like this]] a corresponding note will be automatically created.
In Panda, this functionality seems to be missing. I suspect it will be re-added with time but I’m worried about its future functionality. Notebooks app works similarly like the direction Panda is going in and I always found trying to link between notes to be fiddly at best. I also can’t see how linking to a specific heading within another note (file?) would work with Panda.
The new features look great but without the current ease of interlinking, Bear would lose the main reason I’m using it.
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Howdy gnome.irdan,
[[Linking]] will still be part of Bear. Panda is just the editor, so “what goes on in a single note.” From their email, Bear can explain:
As we mentioned in December, we are now ready to start testing many of your most requested features on iOS. Code named Panda, this is a standalone early preview of just the Editor inside of Bear—other key features like the Sidebar and tags will arrive later. This also means Panda does not touch existing Bear notes.
While, they didn’t mention anything about [[Links]] I’m 100% (lol, okay 99.999999999% positive) they will be in the final version of Bear. Panda is just the testing grounds for the Editor.
I hope this helps… because yes [[Linking]] is SUPER SUPER critical. I also hope they at bidirectional links (or backlinks) in the future. 
I get it that they will likely re-add linking. However, the discrete file model makes it more flimsy than the current database model:
- linking to a specific header in another note (a current feature) would require a very non-standard implementation
- currently, links get updated automatically if you change the name of a note. This would be very hard to achieve if every note is a separate file because you use note identifiers. Unless they add a database on top of discrete files - which would make things confusing and not very transparent.
- Links to files would really call for a standard Markdown implementation to work well like this which is less elegant [[than this]].
- Semi-related but I’m also interested in understanding if nested tags will interplay with folder structure in any way.
Ahh, gotcha. I misunderstood. Yeah, I’m at my knowledge limit when the database type starts being discussed. I’ll be interested to hear Bear’s response.
I’ll go out on a limb here, but I believe Obsidian works with discrete files as you referenced in point 2. When I change the name of the note it will update the links across all the documents. However, since the entire substructure of Obsidian is simply markdown text files, I assume Obsidian has a database on top of the independent files. Obsidian also links to headers with this format in the plain text file [[Title of Note#Header Link]]. Not sure if that helps, but from 7 months of personal experience it seems to work well. I’m currently playing around with Obsidian and have ~800 linked note so far.
The discrete file model is only for Panda as a alpha preview of the editor only. Once the new editor is fully released within Bear, the developers have said the Bear note database will remain unchanged.
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Hello everyone!
I want to officially confirm what @eddykatz said: Bear 2.0 will be database-based as it is the current version.
Panda is just an alpha version of the editor that will be inserted inside Bear 2.0 beta and then released as release version. Because we will have to make some changes to the current DB structure, we wanted to approach one dangerous task at the time (both editor update and database update could lead to data loss, so we want to be 101% sure that each part works individually); the real bearish experience will be available with the release of the beta in a future time.
I want to thank you all for taking the time to try Panda!
Have an awesome day!
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