Bear 2 keeps its text clean by hiding all its Markdown code until the cursor is clicked into each sentence to be edited. This then reveals the (grey) Markdown coding, or the (also grey) ’h1-h6’ button in the margin next to headings.
However, the ’Link editing button’ — the little pencil icon that triggers the link editing popup — behaves quite differently.
It’s always visible, and it’s always red. In fact, it’s the only visible text element that’s not part of the written text content.
Although this visible icon eliminates one mouse click when editing links, it’s inconsistent with all the other Markdown editing behaviour. And, more importantly, it breaks Bear 2’s otherwise beautiful, uncluttered typography. (It looks especially distracting when several links appear close to each other in a sentence or a list.)
My suggestion is to:
Make the Link editing button behave exactly the same as all other Markdown coding
or
Offer two options for Markdown hiding in Settings:
’Hide Markdown’ to hide symbols only
‘Hide Heading and Link icons’ to hide these editing buttons
The reason for the existence for the pencil was due to it being similar to the wikilinks. If we remove that icon we need to find another way to distinguish between the two and I donmt know if there is any other easy to implement + recognisable way.
So far the fastest way to show links within text is to hit delete once at the end of the link which will delete the closing bracket, breaking the markdown, showing the raw link.
Sorry, I didn’t follow the original discussion, but if I had, I’d have expected the icon to be a little north-east arrow to denote an active external link button, and clicking the link text to open the editing popup.
But, I’d much prefer to distinguish the two types of links by underlining one of them, and still eliminating the icon, as per my suggestion.
Yeah I also find the pencil icon kinda too big and distracting, especially when you place hyperlinks in the middle of sentence. Also, a pencil doesn’t immediately scream “external link” to me. The original B1.0 link icon looked like a link, and up-right arrow would do the trick too.
But I also can appreciate that it saves a click when trying to edit a link. It’s just that I don’t really edit links that often and could live with Control-clicking the link and choosing Edit or something like that. But mostly I think its job is to show to that clicking something will throw you out of Bear; it’s just could be somehow less wide and less complex than what it is now.