Bear Version: 2.9.3 (14672)
OS Version: macOS 27 beta 4
What were you doing:
Cleaning up notes in the Untagged tag. My usual pattern is: click a note in the list, read it in the editor, then go back to the list and either move to the next note or delete it.
What feature did you use:
Keyboard navigation in the note list — the arrow keys to move between notes, and Cmd+Delete for Move to Trash.
What happened:
As soon as I click in the editor, the note list loses keyboard focus and I cannot get it back. Clicking a note row in the list selects the note and shows it in the editor, but the keyboard still goes to the text view. From that point:
- The arrow keys move the text cursor. They do not move between notes.
- Cmd+Delete deletes the text to the start of the line. It does not move the note to Trash.
- No key I have tried returns focus to the list.
The list still looks active — the selected row keeps its highlight, exactly as it does when the list does have focus. So there is no way to see where my keystrokes will go. The only way I have found to delete a note after this is the menu (Note > Move to Trash) or a right-click, which means using the mouse for every single note.
This makes it slow to work through a set of notes. The keyboard flow only works until the first time I touch the editor, and then it is gone for the rest of the session.
What did you expect to happen:
Two things:
- Clicking a note row in the list should give the list keyboard focus. After that, the arrow keys should move between notes and Cmd+Delete should move the selected note to Trash.
- The list and the editor should look different when they have focus. The selected row should have a distinct state when the list is focused and when it is not, so I can see which pane gets the next keystroke.