New Highlighter: Addressing your feedback and next steps

Bear feedback
1

Hello everyone!

We’ve been busy with version 2.3 and fixing bugs for the new Apple OS, but now that we’re mostly done, we’d love to address all your feedback on the new highlighters (we can tell some of you are very passionate about highlighters! :slightly_smiling_face:).

Why We Added Multiple Highlights Colors

The addition of multiple colors was a highly requested feature and seemed like a perfect fit for Bear. When designing this, we focused on several key points:

  1. Markdown compatibility: We want it to work smoothly with Markdown (as discussed previously on the forum).
  2. Theme consistency: Colors should maintain their meaning when switching themes. For example, green should remain green, as many of you use colors for specific purposes in your notes.
  3. Appearance across themes: The colors are tinted to match each theme’s background, so they look great regardless of which theme you’re using.
  4. Non-intrusive: If you prefer to stick with the basic highlighter, you can ignore the new colors completely.
  5. Accessibility: We made sure that the highlighter maintains the best possible contrast between text and background for readability, achieving AAA accessibility standards.

Addressing Your Concerns

Color Blindness

We understand that color blindness is an important issue, and the current feature may not be as useful for everyone. Here are a couple of solutions we’re considering:

  1. Introducing different background patterns for each color.
  2. Offering an alternative color palette specifically designed for color-blind users. While it may not align with traditional semantic colors, it could at least help differentiate highlights more effectively.

We would really appreciate your thoughts on this, as we want to create a feature that works well for everyone.

Requests for the Old Highlighter Color

Some of you have asked for the previous theme-defined highlighter to return, but this isn’t likely to happen, as it would interfere with the core goals of the new feature. Instead, we’d love to know what specifically you don’t like about the new colors. We’ve worked hard to make them blend seamlessly across themes, but we’re open to making adjustments if we can improve the overall experience.

Highlighted Text Color

The new highlighter changes the text color based on the background, ensuring better accessibility and overall aesthetics (at least, that’s what we aimed for :slightly_smiling_face:). Some of you have mentioned that the current highlights don’t emphasize the text enough. We went for a soft look, but if the text isn’t standing out as much as you’d like, we’re open to adjusting the background vibrancy or darkening the text.

We introduced this feature to make Bear more useful to everyone, and while it’s been generally well-received, we’re always looking for ways to make it even better. Your feedback is crucial, so please keep sharing your thoughts. We’ll do our best to make this feature as excellent as it can be!

Thank you!

3 Likes
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Thanks, as always, for listening and for a considered response.

I’m curious about the rationale for exporting a colour emoji in the highlight markdown syntax (for all non-default colours) - what’s the perceived benefit? I’d prefer it was just standard markdown syntax regardless of the chosen colour.

Also, is there any possibility/likelihood of being able to select a different default colour option?

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There are several advantages to doing this:

  1. You can re-import the Markdown into Bear, and your color formatting will remain intact.

  2. Markdown is designed to be readable without a specialized editor, so preserving the color information in plain text ensures that the meaning remains clear:

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  3. Ideally, if this gains popularity, other editors could easily adopt support for it as well. :blush:

This is a bit challenging, as changing the default syntax color would alter the meaning in all of your existing notes. We’ve considered it, but we worry it could create confusion.

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Let’s take an example.

Dark Graphite theme was beautiful with the blue highlight, consistent with underlines and links.

Now highlights are murky green. Sadly it’s rather ruined what was a beautiful look across all my notes.

Yes I could use blue highlights - but it injects an extra ux step and an export emoji and that’s not great at all.

Sadly I’ve shifted to Nord theme, as at least the default highlight is the same colour as the links etc and won’t export an emoji… but I really don’t like the theme.

So a step backwards vote from me.

I do appreciate what you are trying to do, but my appreciation has stepped down a notch I’m afraid.

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This is a valid complaint, and I’ll discuss it with the team to find a solution or a way to reduce its impact.

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Many thanks for your response. Delighted you are open to changes.

The most important change I’d like to see is to have (in light themes as well as dark) at least the option to have highlighted text in the theme’s body font color, rather than as a somewhat darker variant of the highlighter color. The latter is simply not as crisp a read.

Regarding the highlighter colors themselves–I realize they change among themes, but now (as @promethean has noted here) I am forced to choose a theme because it has a highlighter hue I prefer, rather than choosing a theme that I prefer knowing that I will also have a highlighter hue that I’ve been using and relying on for years.

My preferred theme is Ayu. The new options with that theme are…candyish (apologies for the imprecision and judgmental edge of that term). I’m sorry to say that I’m reluctant to use them, which makes the application less useful. I relied on the old high-visibility green highlight color, but if it can’t be brought back I’d actually prefer a more neutral palette of options than the current ones.

1 Like
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Certainly there are always trade-offs when having a software product, personally I like it and like having the additional color options.

Right now I am primarily using it to help break up sections within a note.

On that “note”, would I be possible for additional section/horizontal line options? Like the options Craft has with the 3 dots, etc. I see that Markdown supports various ones.

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@bolive, you can use three asterisks, hyphens, or underscores in a row, and Bear will draw a horizontal line across the note!

1 Like
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@matteo, thank you for caring about this!

For me, the thing that is difficult is that the green and yellow look almost the same, and the blue and purple are too close. Some suggestions:

  • It looks like you’re using some transparency in your colors to blend nicely with the themes, but it’s not always working systematically and is also reducing contrast by a little too much. Can you try reducing the amount of transparency? If you’re rendering at 80%, try 90%, for example.
  • The green you’ve chosen is yellow-green. If that green were more neutral (Think Dartmouth College’s logo), it would be further separated from the yellow color, which would make it easier for them to be separated.
  • If the blue color was just a little lighter, and the purple could be a little deeper, it might be enough to separate them properly.

I would love to see a mockup of the background patterns idea - it’s smart, but I haven’t seen something like this before.

Also, please feel free to contact me to evaluate adjustments. I have spent my career running product management and UX & Design design teams and I have led initiatives to support WCAG guidelines at a couple of companies now—maybe I can be helpful.

2 Likes
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It would be ideal if you could set a default highlight colour… eg blue (Which works so nicely in dark graphite)… to remove the extra UX step.

It would also be ideal if you could have a setting to remove the emoji export from the colour highlights.

I think I’d be satisfied with the implementation then. I’d be able to use my favourite theme, with a consistent highlight colour, and not feel that the markdown export has been somewhat tarnished. I appreciate that under the hood having a default blue highlights would need you to inject the :large_blue_circle:. I just wouldn’t want it on export.

I think all that would be a win-win.

In fact, if there was only one request I could make-I’d ask for the ability to set a highlight emoji colour. Alternatively, just remember the last highlight colour you’ve used? That would skip the need for any defaults. The export option is just a nice to have.

To be clear, I am actually pro the extra colour highlights. Just a little frustrated at the implementation.

4 Likes
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Best solution - just remember the last used highlighter colour used? Solved. I won’t complain any more!

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For me, the Color-Higlight thing is very useful. Thanks for that. I use the same colors als my finder tags to have a consistent system. …

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As it is now, I can read the text very well, but the immediate psychological effect when reading is that the marked lines seem to be torn out of the text and thus suggest a meaning that goes beyond the marking. I therefore support this wish for another reason.

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15

First, thank you for consistently addressing and at least trying to find solutions to all of our feedback.
Simply put, I think a making the highlight colors more vibrant would be the best option.
Right now, the colors are almost “dull.” Which limits my productivity because the text color almost blend together and I find myself almost pausing to better read the highlighted text.

Yes, I can still highlight and my productivity is not impacted significantly. (I said in another post that I can’t believe how opinionated I am over a highlighter color). I think a more vibrant color pallet would get closer to the original “benefit” of the old highlighter while still maintaining the new benefits of the multiple color pallet (p.s. which I do love!).

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To this point, the feature is called “Highlighter” - which, by definition, should be somewhat vibrant.

Also, the tool icon says “highlight” - which is what I wish it still did. Instead it opens a menu. This extra step is bothering some of us.

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I don’t have a strong opinion here, but the text editing behavior of the highlight icon did surprise me: It does not allow me to delete text when the cursor is next to the icon.

If I press delete, nothing is deleted and instead this menu is shown:

Screenshot 2024-09-19 at 21.54.44@2x

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They really don’t, you know.

I use the D.Boring theme. Prior to this change, the text was black on a white background, and the highlight was a vivid yellow. Perfect.

Now highlighting text turns it and the background a muted green. Switching the highlight to “yellow” turns the text and background…muted orange?

I realise you can’t please all of the people all of the time. But making big design changes out of the blue was what stopped me using Craft. I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come from Bear.

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It’s a problem of the digital world. As consumers, we pay for products, but we don’t truly own them. When you buy an analog notebook, it’s yours. Moleskine, for example, will never be able to touch it again. However, if you pay for a digital notebook, it will stop working or the developers, as the true owners, will always have the ability to change it without your consent.

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@Idrydenb is spot on. I also used D.Boring because of the contrast between text and highlighted text. I want the highlight to stand out. These new highlighters fade into the background. Not usable.

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