The idea with emoji picker seems to be popular but i see three negative points:
You have to know about the possibility that picking circles from emoji picker will change highlight colour. It is not as obvious as a popup list with colors that appear automatically in the right moment. That is self explanatory:
The emoji picker could provoke the misunderstanding that other emojis also have some kind of result: What about the brown or black circle? Or what happens if a normal emoji is choosen? Why at all all emojis are showed in that context? And so on.
The popup colour palette is needed also in other ways. I do not mean only the context menu but also the hotkey or the icon in the stylebar. There is no way to write “:r”. The pop up palette is the only way to have a consistent way in all methods to trigger a highlight
Depending on the theme currently there are many highlight colors that are green-ish, red-ish and so on. After implementation of that feature the “normal” highlight colour (that one without unicode circle) should represent in each theme the same colour to avoid confusion about its meaning. Something grey-ish remains as colour. Or is it a bad idea for a special reason in regard to the themes?
Out of curiosity: Will the 6 highlight colours be calculated automatically upon the base of already existing colours? Or are they handpicked ?
We’re still discussing some details of the feature, but the current idea is to pick a color from the new one we’re going to add (eg: green) and make that the default color used for the highligther without emoji.
We want all the colors to keep their semantic between themes, so we’re trying to have a formula that adapt the colors to the current theme:
I love these, but for some reason I think they are missing the classic “marker” effect, like very bright yellow or green (the current highlight color in Bear is really nice!)
Have you skipped the orange colour because it is difficult to distinguish between it on one side and yellow resp. red on the other side? I see in the illustration that yellow and red could be confused with orange in some themes.
I actually like more the less obstrusive colours. For paper i use the pastel colours rather than the neon colours. That’s a matter of taste
I am not sure if i understand correctly. You want to say that depending on the theme the default highlight colour would be a different one? I am not sure if that is a good idea from the view of a user. All the colours have a special meaning and that would lead that the default colour (no unicode circle, no markup at all at writing) will change its meaning with each theme. Actually it is better if the default highlight colour always has the same meaning.
A suggestion: I think yellow is the colour that most users would consider as a good one for default, at least here in germany. However, don’t know how it is in other countrys
Although, I agree with Chris that yellow should be the default. In literature highlighting systems, green is used for the passage’s main idea or big takeaways. In argument mapping, green is used to highlight supporting arguments. In law school, for case briefs, yellow is used as the default. The reason why is that, in the days before computers, law school students could buy replacement yellow markers individually instead of buying a whole pack (which they would have to do if they used, say, green as their default).
One: Not breaking Markdown compatibility is strongly preferred. I am taking notes I want access to for the rest of my life and if you guys ever go out of business, I want to port them to another Markdown app with minimal difficulty.
Two: The idea was suggested to offer a drop down color picker. This might work, but pop ups like this can interrupt flow easily if they happen too often.
I have disabled spell check pop ups in apps for this very reason. They were distracting me from the act of writing and thinking.
Thank you for building one of my favorite pieces of software of all time. You all rock.
Obviously it would be available through menus and perhaps some shortcuts. But it would also be nice if one could just type away like with other markdown syntax. Typing the color patches is not very easy so ideas about this are welcome.
I would say you could create custom keyboard shortcuts and make the the starting letter of the color the default command for that color for example (Ctrl+Cmd+y) and then the selected higlighted text would be yellow
Maybe typing something like >== can trigger the color picker and will be replaced with =={cursor}== and will be ready to type highlighted text with the chosen color. Then typing just == will use the default highlight color.
If you wanted to change the color, you can show a button near the highlight when that line is focused like you do with links in case the user wants to show a link preview.
UPDATE:
Just saw the update in TestFlight. Your solution is very nice! I like it a lot! I wasn’t too far off though which is really cool!
brown or 
black circle? Or what happens if a normal emoji is choosen? Why at all all emojis are showed in that context? And so on.
