A better core
This might be one of our most significant under-the-hood updates that may be hard to see in your daily work with Bear. But you’ll feel it.
Six months in the making, this Panda release includes IceMark—our brand new, custom Markdown parser, built from pixel to bit for Bear 2.0 and beyond. IceMark is the engine that now powers all your Markdown writing and edits, whether a note has a brief shopping list or a million characters.
We built our own parser because we need speed, and so do you. The open-source solutions available around the web are built for conversion, not editing. Those parsers are great, but they’re built to chew through an entire document and convert it into something else.
Speed and accuracy
We need Bear 2.0 to instantly catch and display individual edits made in a sea of text, various formatting, and attachments. Right tool, right job, and now our parser does that job 30 times faster.
IceMark is a model CommonMark citizen and a foundation for the future of Bear, including the web version. It deftly handles features like highlighting (a custom extension we had to build) and our upcoming support for RTL (Right-to-Left) languages. Want to write a mixed language sentence in Arabic and English, and highlight part of it? Go right ahead. Want to do it in a web browser on other platforms? That’s on the way, too.
IceMark may not be as tangible as tables or an automatic GIF button, but we’re pretty darn excited about it. Please take it for a spin in this latest Panda and let us know what you think.
Thanks for testing Bear
We really appreciate all your help and feedback in testing Bear. In fact, this new test build was entirely a result of your feedback! Please keep it coming, and we’ll be in touch in the forum threads.
Download the App
To try all the new features go to the alpha page: https://bear.app/alpha/
