Big +1 to this. I accidentally deleted a large body of text recently while chopping and chunking some writing in Bear, and in between app restarts, I couldn’t find a whole 3 paragraph block 
. Thankfully, it was in my clipboard history manager, but it would have been painful if it wasn’t.
This, like E2EE, is a pressing need for me, unlike a web version, and Panda. First get the basics right (like security/privacy, and protection against accidental data loss), then add new stuff. Bear is great, but really lacking here.
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Note revision is one of the most important missing features in Bear for me!
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Another +1. Revision history is important. As I recall, the way this worked in Evernote (where I came from years ago) is when you restore a note from a previous version it becomes the latest version (though the revision history remains intact, including a version with the most recent edits prior to the restore). The behavior (as I recall) was also the same with files in dropbox when I used that (I had “pack rat” with unlimited version history).
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+1 from me as well. Would love to have this for security of not losing note contents
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+1, any update regarding a timeline for this feature?
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+1 same for me. I’ve lost data many times by switching to another note and can’t undo. I’m scheduling more Bear database backups in the meantime while waiting for this feature.
+1 to automatic per-note revisions being created periodically while editing it.
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I just signed up for an account here to add that this feature is very much needed. Consider the case where information from a note is accidentally deleted and the user only realises later. There is no way currently to retrieve what was in the note previously.
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Perhaps it can be coded along with a solution for this peskiest of bugs. It does seem, to my non-coder’s eyes, somewhat related.
Note revisions are very useful and based on my experiences with SimpleNote, it can certainly work in an app oriented around having a a simple UI (though, I understand it can be a lot of work to design well ofc).
I like the way how it is implemented in the App NotePlan.
Easy to use and yet powerful.
What do you guys think?
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Hopefully the developers won’t forget about this crucial feature with so much attention now going to the web app (that is of no use to me at all, since I always carry my phone, with Bear.app; by the way, who doesn’t?). Not being able to move back in time in a note is really very 2015.
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Its such a fundamental oversight - or a conscious design decision
@HvdG @bearmacho What’s your reference for note versioning with attachments? UpNote?
You bring up a very good point that I did not think of. Having attachments with versioning can make the database grow very quickly.
Obsidian
Apple Notes
Upnote (perhaps)
Most note taking apps I’ve tried have versioning, and if the attachments / embeds change, the version increments. Perhaps Bear keeps it super simple and simply takes one snapshot then allows a rollback to the previous version (because I cant see many people wanting to go back to several versions of a note they created - use Word for that)
I have used multiple prior versions many times when I used evernote. The problem with limiting versions to the last few revisions is simple small edits (like spell checking, or punctuation, or formatting, etc) become new versions and the desired older version can be lost in the process. Evernote kept multiple versions around. I don’t know what the limit was (if any), but I never encountered a problem I couldn’t recover from.
Regarding db size/versioning overhead, I’d say ballpark 10-20% of my notes have multiple edits that span time. I’d say, of those perhaps 10-20% have attachments. Perhaps @trx180 could create a query we could run on our own db to gather modify date vs creation date +/- attachment add/edit dates to get a general sense of what the overall impact might be on db size. I doubt db size would be a problem.
One capability that perhaps could be implemented with versioning is multiple undo across notes where the undo history for each edited note persists when switching between notes as long as Bear is open. Closing Bear would erase the cache. BBEdit has this (for example), but Apple Notes, does not. So this is not a requirement but would be nice (and is related to the “problem being solved” by versioning).
Another capability would be to allow a user to permanently delete/prune older versions of a note.
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It seems to me that there is no real agreement on what exactly is meant by “version control”. There are actually two, in my opinion, fundamentally different expectations:
-
an automated backup, in which versions of a note are saved in the background at specific and predetermined intervals for a certain period of time in order to restore them later
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a manual creation of snapshots or milestones, in which it is not important that several versions are permanently saved at intervals, but manually, as a rule, exactly when a section of the text or note has been completed. This has the advantage that an endless number of versions are not saved.
My interest would be variant no. 2
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