I’ve been using Bear long enough to appreciate its multi-tag model — a note belonging to multiple tags simultaneously is truer to how ideas actually exist than the single-folder model. But I find that the interaction design doesn’t yet help me internalize this fluently.
The specific friction: when I’m reading a note and accidentally click one of its tags, I’m suddenly viewing all notes under that tag, with no visible indication, within the note itself, of which tag I came from or which tag context I’m currently inside.
The request is minimal: when viewing a note’s tag context (in the sidebar), visually highlight in the note body itself, (1) the tag currently active in the browsing context, and (2) the previously active tag.
This would provide two things:
- Orientation: I always know which lens I’m currently viewing the note through
- Recovery: an accidental tag click becomes easily reversible
A side effect over time would be pedagogical — seeing those two highlighted tags on every navigation would gradually train the multi-context intuition that Bear’s model assumes but the UI doesn’t yet teach.
The underlying data is already there; Bear knows which tag I navigated from. This is purely a UI decision, and a small one. But I think it would meaningfully close a specific gap between Bear’s ontology and how it feels to use it.