Indented Headings

I really dislike the indentation of headings. I don’t see how it makes sense and have never seen anyone else do it. Maybe it’s messing with the margins of the note, but I guess you could just introduce the same spacing on the other side? Also not sure about the new icons but that’s for another thread.

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Add my vote here! IMO, header icons should stay in the gutter as they are in Bear today.

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Thank you for the feedback, at the moment we’re quite happy with the current status of the headers, but we’ll use the alpha/beta to collect more opinions :slight_smile:

Yeah same here, a backward step, much less readable and usable.

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I’m also in agreement with the OP and other posters here.

It seems like all the indicators that live in the gutter in Bear today (list bullets, quote line, etc.) have moved out of the gutter, not just the header indicators. Is this something related to the alpha, or an intentional design decision?

In my opinion all these indicators should remain in the gutter as they are today, to me it’s easier to read and more visually consistent that way.

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+1 for disliking the way headers are handled here. (both indenting and icon choice)
I will miss the metadata being put on the outside of the left margin if that is your final decision.

On the other hand, I heartily agree with eliminating it when it comes to bullets. Since the bullets actually ARE visible – metadata markers are not.

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Seconding this opinion. I could get used to headers being indented, but I’d rather have the indicator live in the gutter – but the change in bullets getting out of the gutter are great.

FWIW, I vastly prefer seeing H1, H2, H3, H4… etc. to the new icon for headers. Largely because I find myself using H4-H6, which currently just loop back through the icons of H1-H3 again, and the header numbers are simply more readable than the new icons.

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I’m personally a huge fan of the way Bear put punctuation and symbols in the margin. Being able to change the formatting of text (e.g. from paragraph to list to quote) and it doesn’t make the text shift around is awesome.

I assume the driver of this change is trying to get rid of Bear’s gutters entirely so phone screens can show more text.

But the new formatting creates a ragged text edge since now paragraph text visually sticks out to the left.

Would it be possible to append the new heading menu to the right? (Moving this one menu made me realize that simultaneously solving for wysiwyg and markdown editing is a hard problem)

panda-headings-right

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I personally like the new heading design.

I always found it disorienting for headings / bullets to move in and out of the gutter as I type. The new design mimics the feel of editing plaintext, which I find much more intuitive.

Also, as others have mentioned, I strongly prefer the style of indented bullets. If bullets are indented, headings should also be indented for visual consistency.

Maybe make the heading icon a bit darker? This would help fill the whitespace so that the headings don’t look indented.

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I preferred bear 1’s way of moving the icons to the margin so that my document is aligned. From a structure point of view, it makes more sense to me - indenting normally suggests that the item belongs to whatever is above it (like indenting lists).

I never really liked the bullets defaulting to the margin as they never looked like they belonged to the text above them, so I prefer them defaulting to be inside the body of the note.

When my text is aligned and icons fade into the margin, I think everything feels cleaner. The default welcome window looks a lot busier in bear 2.0 and slightly harder to read than if you paste it into Bear 1.0

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This might sound extreme, but if the headings move to this approach it would probably cause me to stop using Bear. Indented bullets makes sense, but keeping the headings mark-up outside the main text is much easier to read.

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I’m not a fan of the lines, but I would prefer moving the icon to the right, if they are going to exist like @dego showed. Great idea @dego!

Would it be possible to add a setting for whether headers / lists are indented are not? I personally strongly prefer the current behavior of putting the symbols in the margins, but a lot of people feel strongly the other way. I think you’d get a lot of value out of a setting so everyone can choose the formatting they prefer.

Also, this applies to quotes too – I would really like for the vertical line to continue to appear in the margin as well.

It will be great if the indentation could have different levels such as 1) a) 1. etc.,

IMO the new inline header symbol causes headers to wrap in an odd way. I recognize that this is how raw markdown would look (with # characters), but I think Bear’s previous outdent solution was an elegant solution.

header-wrap

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New users can apparently only upload one image per message, so I can only offer a compare and contrast with two messages. Sorry.

Here’s some text in Bear

In Bear, the lack of indentation for the quote indicator and list numbers is a little awkward, but at least they’re aligned with the H1 and H2 indicators for visual consistency.

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Here’s the same text Panda

In Panda, the indentation of the quotation and list indicators is welcome, but the headings appear to be aligned with the quote and list item text, making for a confusing visual hierarchy. The second heading appears to follow on from the list, rather than leading into the following paragraph.

As suggested above, darkening the heading icon (and maybe reducing the gap between heading icon and heading text) might reduce that impression, but for now the depiction of headings makes for an uncomfortable reading and writing experience.

I’d prefer the headings not to be indented, as is currently the case in Bear.

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Moving the header icon to the right as @dego suggests would be a great compromise. I strongly support this idea.

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I think this is a great suggestion, with one small caveat: if the title is exactly the page width, then the icon will either fall off the page or require a page break to display, which might be a little ugly

I agree that moving the heading icon to the right looks better. The problem is that markdown doesn’t work this way. Bear is a markdown editor, and the Bear heading icon is a stylization of the markdown ### heading symbols. In markdown, the heading symbols fall to the left, not to the right.

### This is heading

This is not a heading ###

1 Like