Panda Feature Requests / Feedback

Beta Panda Feedback
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Hi,

Been happy with the direction of Panda. Recently gone on the rounds of trying to find a replacement, but found Craft clunky and Obsidian lacking in care and polish, so came back to Panda/Bear :slight_smile:

Have a few bits and pieces in terms of feature requests / feedback. I think some of these have come up before here and there; consider this a +1 for the feature request if they have.

Feedback

  • Table Header Row: Can I create a table without a header row? The top row always appears to be bolded.
  • Table Width: It would be good if tables would resize to take up the full width of teh page if they don’t contain much text (I couldn’t seem to find a way to resize them at least). This would also been good for other elements such as files and other media. Having them not span the width gives the pages a bit of a lop sided feel. See attached terrible mockup.
  • Table Text Wrapping: Conversely a lot of text in tables causes them to scroll. This looks a bit untidy as you end up with horizontal scrollbars. More importantly also makes the table harder to read, because to see the full contents you always have to scroll to see the full contents — I’d definitely prefer to wrap the text instead. I feel the same way about code block scrolling (although I think a few people prefer scrolling over wrapping for them and I can see the argument; for tables, not so much).
  • Image viewing: on iOS is a regression from Bear to me. When you go fullscreen it resizes to match a popover window width rather than fullscreen.

Feature Requests

  • Media Support: If would be great to be able to playback video files in Panda. I know this idea was recently shot down, but it would be really useful (Apple Notes handles this pretty elegantly). Anecdotally, in order to get a couple of short mp4 files playable inline I’m having to convert them from a small mp4 (4.8 mb) to a large gif (44mb). I’m sure I could get it smaller messing around with ffmpeg settings, but life’s too short :slight_smile:

  • Command palette/search bar: particularly for quick opening files and searching.

  • Improved Search: while I’m finding the search in Bear is good and usually turns up good results, the ui is a bit clunky. Would be good if the token syntax a bit more discoverable, and it was easier to search for tags, dates etc.

  • /: It seems that typing ‘/’ seems to had become standard for displaying a list of formatting (see Craft / Noteplan / Confluence etc). Might be nice to have this in bear as well. It’s a convenient way of formatting text or inserting links etc without having to either remember the syntax or take your hands off the keyboard to click things with the mouse.

  • Copy button on code blocks: Kinda self explanatory; would be handy.

Hope the team at Shiny Frog have a good break and looks forward to seeing what this year brings for Bear/Panda!

Cheers,

Julian

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1 Like
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Hi there Julian,

Many thanks for giving Panda a go, and for taking the time to leave a post full of feedback for us here.

Thank you also for your nice end comment, we did have a nice little break and are ready to get back at it!

Regarding the table questions, the header row is intended and can’t be amended.

Regarding the other notes on tables, as we are following Markdown guidelines and rules we have some limitations.

Due to this i’m not sure if the suggested would be possible, but i’ll alert the development team to it to double check.

Thank you for your note on image viewing, i’ll pass on this to the team to bear in mind also.

Regarding video files/ embedding videos, we’ve decided against adding the ability to play videos inside the Editor at the moment.

We agree that it could be of benefit, but we also have to consider does it make sense for Bear?, and what the possible drawbacks of adding it are.

Therefore, as noted, we ultimately decided against adding the ability for now. If anything changes on this front though, we will let the community know.

Regarding search experience, this is definitely something we’d love to improve for the community, and is something we’re currently working on.

In the meantime (if you have not seen it already), you can check out some advanced search options for Bear here: Advanced search options in Bear | FAQ & Support | Bear App

Regarding the slash character /, this characters function is already being used when creating italics when Polar Bear Markup language is enabled. We’ve no current plans to amend this at the moment, but thank you for sharing your viewpoint on it.

Regarding the copy button suggestion, i’ll pass it onto the team to consider!

Many thanks again for the comprehensive feedback, and for giving Panda a go.

If you’ve any other queries or questions, let me know as i’d be happy to help!