# Pasting bullets breaks hierarchy and flattens existing structure

**URL:** <https://community.bear.app/t/pasting-bullets-breaks-hierarchy-and-flattens-existing-structure/19852>\
**Category:** Bear feedback\
**Tags:** bug\
**Created:** [September 13, 2026, 3:38pm UTC](https://community.bear.app/t/pasting-bullets-breaks-hierarchy-and-flattens-existing-structure/19852 "2026-09-13T15:38:52Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mwichary](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/community.bear.app/mwichary/32/7590_2.png) [@mwichary](https://community.bear.app/u/mwichary)\
**Post date:** [September 13, 2026, 3:38pm UTC](https://community.bear.app/t/pasting-bullets-breaks-hierarchy-and-flattens-existing-structure/19852/1 "2026-09-13T15:38:52Z")

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Pasting bullet points inside bullet lists often breaks hierarchy, but more importantly, it also flattens existing bullets, which is data loss.

You can see an example here (video). At the end of paste, children of C end up being peers to C, even though they didn’t start as such.

I encounter this all the time and it makes keeping lists in Bear tricky. It seriously bit me just right now, because it flattened some hierarchy on some paste a few hours ago, but I didn’t notice – and now I have a long list that’s flatter and really confusing as a result; I had to spend a bunch of time restoring it by hand, because relevant undo was too far away.

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**Author:** ![trix180](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/community.bear.app/trix180/32/588_2.png) [@trix180](https://community.bear.app/u/trix180)\
**Post date:** [September 14, 2026, 7:05am UTC](https://community.bear.app/t/pasting-bullets-breaks-hierarchy-and-flattens-existing-structure/19852/2 "2026-09-14T07:05:00Z")

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We can’t reproduce the issue. If you are using Bear 2.9.4 or 2.10, can you share the note in the video as .bear file?

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**Author:** ![mwichary](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/community.bear.app/mwichary/32/7590_2.png) [@mwichary](https://community.bear.app/u/mwichary)\
**Post date:** [September 14, 2026, 1:53pm UTC](https://community.bear.app/t/pasting-bullets-breaks-hierarchy-and-flattens-existing-structure/19852/3 "2026-09-14T13:53:30Z")

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Oops, I was on 2.7 – I didn’t realize I was behind on my updates. The problem is gone on 2.10!

Great to see it fixed, it was such a pain for so long.