Feedback on Bear 2 beta, ToC, themes, interface etc

[DavidB]

So I played around with the beta today. Thank you for making it available. What I liked right off the bat:

• My 2k+ notes imported within 15-20 seconds, which is perhaps because I don’t use many attachments.

• I love the ability to check the outline / Table of Content. This has been a long awaited feature for me.

However, I really think there should be a way to display the outline in a right sidebar a bit like one can do in Obsidian. Or at least, allow it to float like the toolbar in Bear 1. I want it to remain visible while I work on a document.

From a looks perspective, I found myself missing Bear 1 a little bit, but I know the themes, font and preferences are not quite ready so I’ll reserve judgment for now.

One thing which has become clear, however, is the need for custom themes or at least the ability to make small tweaks (e.g. highlight color). I’m sure the community could come up with amazing themes.

None of the themes quite do it for me (Gandalf is my choice rn). I’ve read elsewhere on here that one can tweak the JSON theme files in the application bundle, but I haven’t found those files. A simple theme with dark sidebar soft yellow highlighting like in Ulysses or Roam is something I’d like to see.

Aside from that, the only glaring feature that I find missing from Bear 2 seems to be MathJax (and backlinks ofc).

I am eager to see where this goes.

[kaassouffle]

You can detach the ToC panel and have it float. Just drag it

[krssno]

A right sidebar is probable:

Right sidebar for all the stuff from information panel (statistics, toc, backlinks)

Hello everybody, quick update on were we are with this: After some toughs we realised the forth panel might indeed be a good solution for both backlinks and TOC but comes with an usability problem when the editor width is too small to fit both text and and forth column (@krssno this pretty much the layout problem you expressed, but with some differences). We are exploring the idea of threshold editor width and displaying the popover when width < threshold and the 4th column when the width > thr…

A theme editor is probable too:

Observations & Desires for Bear 2

To edit/create the theme it can be either but at some point, you have to “import” your theme in Bear so I’m more inclined to an in-app tool.

And guess if it is probable that MathJax will come?

[DavidB]

Great! I tried again and it works. For some reason it was disappearing when I started typing when I first tried it. That’s one less worry.

[DavidB]

Thanks for the informations! Great news on the sidebar.

As usual with Bear development the question is the timeline of development but a sidebar, theme editor and mathjax would certainly be great additions.