New Feature Sneak Peak: Callouts 💬

Hi everyone!

We’ve got something new on the way in the next Bear TestFlight beta: Callouts ! Before the official rollout, we’d love to give you an early look and hear what you think.

About Callouts

Callouts are styled blocks that help highlight important parts of your notes. They make your writing easier to scan and understand, and bring a touch of structure and clarity to your thoughts.

Callouts and Markdown

Callouts aren’t part of standard Markdown, but they’ve been widely used as a Markdown extension in the wild, and we believe they’ll be a super handy addition to Bear. Under the hood, it uses a simple and readable syntax:

Start a quote block with > followed by square brackets containing an exclamation mark and the type (for example, [!NOTE] , [!TIP] , [!WARNING] , etc.), then write the Callout info on the next line. For example:

> [!TIP] macOS trick
> If you have problems with your app, a simple device reboot might just work!

As usual, you don’t have to type the Markdown syntax to insert Callouts in Bear. Callouts are also available from the menu bar and BIU formatting bar, so you can insert them with a simple click.

Callout types

There are five types of Callouts you can choose from:

  • Note – Useful context worth noticing
  • Tip – Smart advice to do things better or more easily
  • Important – Essential info to help you stay on track
  • Warning – Alerts that help you avoid big mistakes
  • Caution – Points out potential risks or negative outcomes

Here’s a little preview of what they look like:

You can also customize the Callout title to say anything you like, or remove the Callout information part if you prefer a cleaner look.

Or have some fun:

Let us know what you think about Callouts: Does it sound useful for your note-taking? How will you use it? We’re excited to hear what you think.

Thanks as always for helping shape Bear! :bear: :heart:

The Bear Team

43 Likes

Wonderful! These simple, but powerful, designations really help various pieces of text to stand out and helps to break up longer pieces of text as well.

You are going to get a lot of high fives and fist bumps over this one!

so excited for this!! are there any previews for how callouts will look in the different themes?

This looks great! Thank you!

This looks amazing. Can’t wait to try it. I have many use cases for this already.

Those look great! Can’t wait to try them out!

This is a great addition to Bear!

Awesome! These will be super useful! I appreciate all of the plain-text-hackery Bear is doing to make the most powerful note taking app built on plain text. I’m glad Bear is taking the lead and moving Markdown forward and adding many useful features like this. Markdown 2.0 let’s say. Just like adding the recent highlight colors with emojis. Creative decision! Looks great in a plain text editor! I always hear Markdown doesn’t have a standard. Well, Bear is updating that standard. Kudos!

How will Copy as Rich Text and Copy as HTML look? I use those features a lot to Apple Mail, Outlook, and WordPress.

These look fantastic - as things always do I Bear. Three comments, though:

  1. The icons look good, but I would prefer to not have them. Bear is so clean and minimalistic. The icons don’t fit in. Also - I suspect that there will be times where I want to use the call-outs for other purposes than what the icons suggest.
  2. Is there any way of putting more than one paragraph in a call-out? The syntax suggest that we would have to a separate call-out for each paragraph. Would these flow together in some way?
  3. Is there a way of skipping the title? I can see myself wanting this.

Overall - these look great, but seem a bit too prescriptive and not so flexible.

Looking forward to using these, anyway.

3 Likes

Like block quotes, callouts can have more than one paragraph and also use other block types like lists and headings.

For the moment, the answer is no to both questions. We didn’t invent the syntax and we want reasonable compatibility with the GitHub and Obsidian implementations.

That said, I wouldn’t rule out that we find ways to improve callouts and feedback is always valuable!

3 Likes

this looks amazing! will more spots in the beta open up?

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How can i get access to the TestFlight beta?

1 Like

It feels like it can be used mostly for some internet guides and I am not sure if I will ever gonna use it in personal notes… but it looks good

It’s going to be one very useful feature!

This looks awesome! It would be great if one day we could customize the icons in the callouts with Bear’s TagCons.

1 Like

This is an example how i wrote an important info. But the new Callouts are perfect. I will love it! Great idea.

Love it. One thing that has always kept me revisiting Craft is at least having some minimal way to further emphasize a note or block of content using color, etc. This is critical to working on projects, where I may have many notes and lots of content, but need to quickly identify key content at a glance. Can’t wait for it – not on beta, so bummed…

Now, with the suspense in place, when will it actually be out on beta?

:slight_smile:

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I guess „macOS trick“ is the alternative title, isn‘t it?

I am happy about call-outs. What I am missing in the presentation is the feature of foldable call-outs. Here the real magic begins: you have so many benefits. Just think about vocabulary or about the possibility to hide text and so on.

Obsidian has following syntax for foldable callouts:

[!TIP]+ macOS trick

or

[!TIP]- macOS trick

„+“ means unfolded by default and „-„ means folded by default

2 Likes

So far there are 5 different types of callouts (Note, Tip, Important, Warning and Caution). As you can see in the following image obsidian has 12 different types and even uses aliases (not alternative titles, but different names inside the square brackets that would show the same icon; f.e. warning and caution in obsidian is the same icon as tip and important is):

How would you achieve compatibility with obsidian? How is a todo-callout shown inside of bear? that question is important mainly in regard to upcoming panda app because both apps would/could work on the same files.

It seems too much to ask, but why not just taking over the 12-callout-system of obsidian and divide these 12 into the 5 colours used in bear? Beyond that that I find the question-callout and to-do-callout extremely useful. I know that alternative titles could be used but the icon would be misleading. And as already said the compatibility would not be achieved to obsidian which is the defacto standard due to its popularity on all platforms

1 Like