What were you doing: trying to add a line separator to a note
What feature did you use: typing
What happened: when typing three dashes no line separator is added to the note
What did you expect to happen: typing three dashes in a note would be automatically replaced by a line separator
I use line separators in my notes all the time and on the mac you can just type three dashes and it automatically turns into a line separator, while on the mobile apps when you type the three dashes it just turns into one long dash and a single short dash. It seems like the only way to add a line separator on mobile is to use the BIU menu every time, which is really inconvenient.
It’s possible this is not a bug, but rather just a limitation of the iOS/iPad versions of the apps, but if this is expected behavior is there a way for me to create some kind of autocorrect to replace the dashes with a line separator on my devices?
That’s the “Smart Punctuation” setting in iOS. It replaces two - with an em-dash. You can disable this feature in the iOS Settings → General → Keyboard. However, I recommend using the Bear custom keyboard instead.
I setup up a text replacement that expands === into - - - which creates the line separator like you mentioned… thanks so much for pointing out this workaround!
It looks like the auto-replace for line separators works on Mac but not on iOS/iPadOS, possibly due to system text handling differences. You might try creating a text replacement shortcut in iOS settings (Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement) to swap — with a line separator. If that doesn’t work, reaching out to Bear support could clarify whether this is a bug or expected behavior.
Apple keyboard text replacements for line separator works fine on iOS as well:
I use ,,- to expand to - - -, this works on Mac, iOS and iPad.
(Note! three dashes with a space in between, to prevent -- transforming into an em-dash)
Or instead, just use the alternative *** by itself, without any need for text replacement, since it also represent line separator <hr/> in Bear and CommonMark.
---
- - -
***
* * *
all these works in Bear as part of Commonmark
(Note! If you use ---, always add a blank line between text and the line separator, since --- directly under text also is old markdown for H2 (and === under text means H1).
It is not clear for me why to use text replacement on macOS (I do not know iPad version). As long as you type fast enough the smart substitution will not be be applied even if activated:
