Markdown headings support hash symbols at the end too, they’re just optional:
### This is a heading ###
If one wanted to, they could argue that a heading icon suffix was still a stylization, just of the closing hash symbols 
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I also dislike the indented headings. I like the style and and variety, but would much prefer headings to be the farthest left aligned item in the page. Losing that visual hierarchy takes away from the simple elegance that made me switch to Bear in the first place.
Thank you for all your work on the development of Bear.
Many additions or changes are very welcome, but I have to strongly agree with many others in this thread. The indented headings are visually confusing and get in the way of my writing and reading.
Thank you ldrydenb for the illustration.
The beauty, simplicity and clarity of the current style helps me with my notes – every single day – I am also not sure, I would continue using Bear, if the indentation of the headings couldn’t be disabled. While I also like the current style of quotes, the new style of lists and quotes is not as disturbing to the structure and flow of the text.
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Same here, I like the current bear layout where it’s on the left and not interrupting the readability. And it is a must for me to see what kind of title size it is. I like to have my documents styled consistently, but it is hard to see from the size of the title what type of H1,2,3 size I used before.
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I agree with Idydenb. Headings should not be indented. I see Bear as a WYSIWYG editor, therefore it should display the text much like it will be rendered in the output such as PDF or HTML.
So, headings should not be indented, since the heading indicator is not visible, whereas I like the indentation of quotation and list indicators.
I really like the new heading icons, though.
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Like some people here I definitely prefer when headings are aligned with the text and not intended. That said I really like the new heading icon with the quick access menu.
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The quick access menu in the heading icon is, I believe, the same as it is on the current version of Bear (not at my Mac to verify). I still will really miss the icon as being H followed by the number. I would love this to be a preference if that’s not unreasonable.
Hello everyone,
thank you all for expressing your opinions about the headers, we’re actively discussing about this and some changes are going to be made.
I’d like to add some thoughts about the current headers:
- one of our goal was to have a larger column of text on iPhones, and removing hanging headers was a solution (which many of you didn’t like
). - the current icon is less recognizable than the H(1,2,3,…), but having a “readable” icon near the title was making scanning the text harder and we wanted to improve that.
We’re discussing about bringing back the header icon in the gutter for larger screens (macOS, iPadOS), but we’re still not sure what to do on smaller screens. Icons are also in discussion, we don’t want to get back to the H ones, but we’re looking for a better alternative.
List/Todo/Quotes will remain as they are now.
We’re happy to take any kind of feedback on this.
Best.
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To throw in another data point, I think losing the hanging headers would be a great solution, similar to how Dropbox Paper does it. I know everyone is different, but the bits of functionality that the header icon allows aren’t super useful to me:
- They allow the user to click to change the header size, but that seems more difficult to me than retyping the appropriate number of
#symbols - They allow the user to drag the headline to a new location in the document. I think this could be useful if you could drag a section (the header and everything in that “section”) but personally I can’t think of a case where I’d want to drag the header but not the sub-elements
That said, if the hanging header is staying I think a good solution would be to expose the literal # symbols, or maybe an icon that resembles them, and to make the color of the header icon more opaque so that visually the header is left-indented even if the text isn’t.
# Hello
Here's some text
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You’re example above (bear as it is right now, without identation) is still the most elegant solution.
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I agree with all those that believe Bear got it right the first time. As another option for small (touch) screens, you could hide the gutter by default, but make it readily accessible via a drag gesture. The usefulness of the old icons cannot be emphasized enough, when you are dealing with a large document with more than 3 levels of headers… and you are trying to verify/resolve incorrect header levels.
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A quick search of r/bearapp shows many requests for indentation of ordered and unordered lists (so yay!) but only a few requests for wider lines on iPhones, most of which are couched as frustration that the line width slider on the Mac and iPad isn’t present on the iPhone.
I know that what seems to be a simple change might be very hard to code, but…
Why not keep the “hanging headers” on all devices (Mac, iPad and iPhone) but have the line width slider go “up to 11”?
If the line width is increased all the way to the edge of the screen, on any device, then—and only then—indent the headers as in Panda?
This should satisfy all the people who like the headers as in Bear at present, and also the people wanting as wide a line as possible.
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I think you should allow for auto-numbering headers. I understand that this is not a feature everybody wants all the time, but when one needs it (with longer notes and text), it’s really a game changer.
Also, the readibility between #, ## and ### is not great as of now
I’d like to see a way to hide all markup indicators. I don’t need an icon to see that a heading is a heading. It looks like a heading therefore it is a heading. If seems that if you added a function to hide/toggle markup indicators that would probably satisfy most people.
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I agree entirely. Well said.
What if the icon is hidden initially but then unhides if the cursor is on the same line as the Header? As soon has you move the cursor off of the header, it hides again. Maybe you could also hide/unhide the Header icon depending if the mouse is hovered over the Header text or not.
I don’t know, just a thought. Cheers!
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Agree with everyone else: very happy that lists are now indented in panda; prefer the outdented header icon in current bear.
I like the suggestion to auto-hide header icons unless the mouse hovers over the line or if the cursor is on the line.
Also like the suggestion to make sections draggable instead of just the header line.
Would also suggest (feature request) that sections be foldable as well as draggable.
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It also allows linking to headers (syntax looks like bear://x-callback-url/open-note?id={UUID}&header={headername}
I think, as with any other markdown syntax, it’d be a shame to hide the header icons.
I think the only alternative that gives the level of clarity that the current release’s icon has while making itself more distinct from the content of the header would be actually putting in every hash symbol, and I don’t think that’s a good compromise. In the color schemes I use, I think it scans quite easily; but perhaps some kind of more-stylized icon that is still representing H(1,2,3…) would be a stronger fit? An “H” that is somehow distinct from any of the Bear-supported fonts?
I think this is probably a strong compromise, though I think the inconsistency between devices might be a trade-off. Without having Panda for iOS, I think I’d personally prefer guttered headers on iPhone to stay.
Thanks for all the great work on Bear. Really appreciated.
I agree that headings should align with the rest of the text and that the header icon can move outside of the I understand the choice to indent headers on smaller screens. For iPad en macOS please make them align with the rest of the paragraphs. I like the heading icons because they’re not a character they don’t distract in your reading flow.
But as a typographer I have another wish.
Currently the editor formats quotes, lists and tasks like this:
Slightly indented and not consequential it seems.
I would like to suggest that quotes, lists, tasks and headers align with the other text like this:
All elements align with the paragraphs and indented bulleted and numbered lists align with the first character of the parent list item.
And it would be great if all spaces between element and text are the same. So the space between quote indicator and quote is optically as big as the space from bullet to bullet text.
It gives much more peace of mind and eyes
Thanks for considering.
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Really nice mock-up!
I personally like something in between; I like exactly what your mock-up has for the handling of quoted text, though a few elements are just a bit farther left than I personally prefer. The checkbox in the original image is the best element in terms of alignment IMO; maybe centering other elements to its center point instead of aligning based on left-most point?
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