I used to use a notes app called Nota and something they had that was awesome was that text that appeared inside parenthesis had a dimmed look, exactly how text looks when a task is marked as completed. Would love to have the option to turn that on for Bear.
Here, you can see Nota uses the dimmed color for text on completed tasks in between the parens and it’s fantastic for not distracting from the main message:
Here you can see Bear does the same thing with the text color for completed tasks. Would love to be able to flip a switch in settings that does this for text inside parenthesis as well.
I posted this before, but it was for Panda. However, I really want this feature in Bear, so I’m posting here as well to hopefully get some traction. I feel like the Bear team would be able to add this no problem.
I wouldn’t want this. Perhaps some sort of other delimiter to dim text. I prefer to have stuff in parentheses the same as regular text, however it would be nice to dim text. That said, Bear is a very simple editor and doesn’t support all kinds of complex coloring or formatting so this perhaps would stray into the realm of making the editor more complex…
In the post, I mentioned that this would be an option a user could turn on in Bear settings. If you wouldn’t want it, then you’d literally have to do nothing. I wouldn’t want a delimiter for this. It should just be a setting for how Bear displays text in parens.
I’m not asking for new markdown syntax or anything like that. Just a setting to tell Bear how to show text inside parenthesis.
It’s similar to how Bear hides markdown syntax, makes headings different sizes, converts - to • for lists, gives the option to show rich links instead of text links, dims completed todos, etc. What I’m asking for literally doesn’t affect your Bear experience at all. You would just leave that setting off which is what it would/should be by default.
Yes, and I would want this to only work part of the time (not all the time, not none of the time). There are plenty of use cases to not dim (e.g. a mathematical formula, or an ascii emoji bounded by parenthesis). Seems a niche thing to me and to “do it right” would be to deviate from the core principles of Bear.
I guess it’s a niche thing, sure. I can still suggest it as I think it would help with readability. I’m not sure why the talk about “principles of Bear” is getting brought up as I don’t think I’m asking for anything over the top. It’s something that would be optional and they already do this in other parts of the app.
The suggestions about not including mathematical formulas and ascii emoji bounded by parenthesis are helpful. Those are useful comments and appreciated.
Just to add my two cents: on the one hand, there’s no doubt that you shouldn’t give an option to such a niche feature that isn’t really that important. On the other hand, I find the argument that dimming improves readability convincing. The text inside the brackets is an insertion and why shouldn’t it be showed as such (without an option to turn off the dimming) if most users would want it that way. The question now is, what do most people want?
