Hello Bear folks. Congrats on developing Lettera. Given your success with the truly splendid Bear app, I’m looking forward to watching Lettera’s evolution.
Please forgive my non-technical question, but not being a programmer, I view apps through a usability and aesthetic lens.
Would you clarify how you’re positioning this app alongside Bear? That is, given the degree of overlap in functionality, why have you chosen to develop a separate app instead of building into Bear those functions that do differentiate the two?
Thank you for making my writing life a joy (with Bear)!
Hello Hayes, and thank you! That’s lovely to hear, on both counts
To be honest, we don’t see much overlap between the two at all.
Bear is a “shoebox” note-taking app: everything lives together in one library, with lots of features around organization, quick capture, and sharing. It’s your personal digital brain that syncs across every device you own, meant to be used often and kept close for whenever you need to look something up.
Lettera is a document-based Markdown editor: it edits files in place, on disk, and has no organizational features of its own (nor sync). Your files are organized however you keep them on disk . It’s meant for more sporadic use.
We like Markdown, so they share that. In our opinion that’s where the overlap ends.
So why make Lettera? Because we kept getting requests for an app like this: one that could open files that don’t live inside its own database, and that works as one more tool in your toolbox rather than a place to keep everything.
And to answer your question directly, we deliberately chose not to build this into Bear. Editing external files just doesn’t fit the way Bear is designed (that shoebox library is the whole idea), and we’re wary of bloating Bear with features that pull against what makes it Bear. A separate, focused app felt like the correct fit.
Wikilinks most likely. Tags aren’t on the list atm, or at least not the way Bear does them. Since Lettera is geared more toward editing shared documents, sprinkling those with tags wouldn’t be a great idea, so it’s unlikely tags will be a first-class citizen in Lettera.
