POLL: Autohide/autofold Completed Todos in Bear 2

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1

According to @trix180, the devs are unsure about autohiding todos:

EDIT: to make things clear, what I’m advocating for here is to incorporate Bear 1’s “completed todo functionality” into Bear 2, so:

  • The ability to manually hide/unhide the selected completed todo(s)
  • A separate option to enable/disable autohiding of completed todos. With this setting checked, all completed todos are hidden when you exit that note. You’re always able to manually toggle completed todos whether or not you’ve got this setting enabled

Since I don’t know how to create an actual poll here, I’m hoping those of you out there who want/need this functionality in Bear 2 will reply to this thread with:

  • A hearty YES if you’re into it
  • A lackluster meh if you’re indifferent
  • A resounding NO if you’re anti-autofolding

Hopefully this thread will get a good response and let the devs know how important this feature is (at least to forum users) and take action if enough ppl respond “YES”.

5 Likes
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I’m obviously a hearty YES!

My personal use case

Since going all in with Bear 2, I’ve found the lack of (auto)hiding completed tasks has pretty negatively affected how I use Bear for project management.

I use Bear for less involved and “spitballing” types of projects and Things3 for more involved stuff. But even with a more informal project, I often generate a ton of checkboxes.

In Bear 1 I could quickly manage these lists by checking stuff off and with “autohide completed todos” enabled, those things would just disappear. If I needed to refer back to something, I would just unhide it, check it out, and hide it again. This was seamless and super fast.

If the list got out of control, I could always break it down into separate sections, and keep going. This all worked surprisingly well.

However, in Bear 2 this is no longer the case. Even a shortish list of tasks becomes a nightmare since you’ve got to parse a list composed of completed and uncompleted tasks. It’s unwieldy and slow, and honestly, ugly looking (Bear’s aesthetics are a big part of why I’m so passionate about it and why I’ve stuck with it literally from the first day it was released).

I’ve tried using “toggle folding”, however, this function doesn’t make sense for tasks because it folds everything under that level and doesn’t take into account task status (finished/unfinished) and just blindly folds everything.

I’ve tried using “move completed to bottom” but I’m not a fan of this function at all because it removes all context with the original nearby tasks and doesn’t work well with nested lists (which is what I primarily use).

So the only other option is to break complex lists up into flat groups with headings and subheadings and regularly clean the list up with “move completed to bottom”.

This works okay, but is a bit fragmented and takes more time to organize and think through, and also breaks some context. It’s far from ideal for my use case, but this schema is what I will probably end up using if this feature isn’t implemented.

To me the lack of completed task hiding feels like the app is actively working against me… making it harder for me to just get stuff done. Autohiding tasks made perfect sense and worked perfectly well. Toggling headings also makes perfect sense and works well. However, they’re two totally different things addressing two totally different problems–they’re similar functionally, but not interchangeable–both of them are super useful and deserve to be in Bear 2.

</soapbox>

2 Likes
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Deafening silence wasn’t what I expected at all :joy:

Oh well at least I tried.

1 Like
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I’d prefer not to* auto hide finished todo items.

For my own workflow, sometimes I prefer hiding the finished todo items (detailed steps that I might not need to know once a task is done), but other times I want them to be kept shown (keeping the context clear so it’s easy to prioritize remaining tasks or brainstorm new ones). Because I see myself needing both, I can use workarounds such as putting finished todos to a separate header (named, say, “Done”) and then fold that header; but I can’t do anything to unhide finished tasks if we are forced to hide the complete tasks.

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5

We seem to have the same sorta workflow, so I think you may actually agree with what I’m proposing :man_shrugging:

By “autohide” I was referring to how completed task hiding works in Bear 1:

  • You can manually toggle the selected completed todos (so hide them manually and unhide them manually)
  • AND you can optionally check a setting called something like “autohide completed tasks” and so if you left that note and came back, all completed tasks would be hidden. However, you could still manually unhide them to see the context.

I’ll update the OP to make what I’m saying clearer.

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A big YES for me too. Entropic’s use description is very similar to my use case and reasoning for re-including it.

Bear 2 is great, but if Bear 1 style auto-fold todos aren’t included, I’m going to need to make some significant changes to my workflow.

Plus, I can’t get the “move completed to the bottom” to work…

7

I’ve never used the option to hide my completed todos in Bear. The things I use Bear for I usually want to see what I’ve completed. Lists I want complete items to drop off of I use Things3 for. That said I’m all about options and I can see the usefulness so I’m a YES as well.

8

YES it’s vital to broad range of bear workflows. Been using Bear since 2018, seriously have to move off of it without this key, simple, no-brainer feature. I’m very curious why remove it in the first place?

9

No:

  1. It’s start’s killing the minimalism of the application, it’s yet another thing that needs to be built, maintained. Than it needs another option pane, the you have to futz about with the settings. Inveriable there will be an edge case where the auto folding breaks context, that will and won’t always work etc…
  2. I don’t want it to hide the tasks I have in there. It’s not my task manager. Whatever is in there are very long tems I tems that once ticked off I don’t want dissapearing.
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It worked beautifully in Bear 1.
Counter to your point that it kills minimalism, the already-working autofold enables minimalism for a wide range of users who have different use cases than yours. There is absolutely no overhead to you if you keep the option disabled.

1 Like
11

YES - I certainly agree with the various use cases and I have one similar.

Edit: Upon thinking about it further I didn’t realize how much I missed the auto hiding of completed todos. How about an option in settings to allow the user to do either/or?

What I don’t quite get is the polarized thinking. This feature used to be in Bear 1 but for whatever reason it is no longer there. There are folks that want it and those that don’t.

Why does it have to be either/or? If the devs were willing to put it back in then why could there not be an option in settings to turn it on/off? Then, that way everyone in the camp is happy.

1 Like
12

Well, actually, it is not a poll, but - how you state it - a demonstration, calling for resounding YES. I am not sure if I am Yes or No. Lets call it “support for autohide”, not POLL.

If it should be an objective POLL, the question should not be “Yes-meh-NO” but "how important is this feature for you and for how you are using Bear - “very important -not important- important not to be implemented” as this (IMO) is what developers are more interested in when implementing some feature. I know that it sounds similar, but I believe the word “important” as opposed to “want” changes the meaning considerably.

13

YES please, you should have the ability to decide whether checked boxes auto hide OR not, AND you should have the ability to manually toggle the functionality any time. I think this is how Bear 1 worked. I wonder why they removed the functionality.

14

meh… I don’t care either way. Never used it.

15

Hearty YES. I use Bear to-dos for shopping lists, with separate notes for different categories like dairy, pantry, produce. What I really want is a default setting for autohide (which existed when I set up my system) — but I want to be able to turn auto hide off for individual notes as needed, without going into settings.

What I have set up is lists of staples that we frequently buy. When I’m preparing for a major shopping trip, I open the lists and uncheck the items we need that day. After I’ve gone through the list, checking or unchecking, I don’t want to see the entire list. I only want to see the items I need.

A different option that would be useful would be the ability to export a set of notes to a single text document that exports only the unchecked items, so I could have a single document of everything on my lists.

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If you would like a shortcut, here is one for your last request that gets all uncompleted todos, creates a new page in which they are grouped by the page they are on.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/aba438a9d7fa42a189292e1761078bb2

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YES
Auto-hiding completed todos was an important feature for me in Bear 1. Its removal without consultation or evaluation of its use to users was very disappointing. This is a paid-for app - please don’t remove important features without consultation.
Please restore the Bear 1 functionality, and if there’s an option to turn autohide on or off, everyone should be happy.