Question: When the new editor becomes part of Bear 2.0, what happens to currently indented bullets from Bear notes?
Scenario: I have thousands of bulleted items that are indented once to keep them, pardon the expression, out of the gutter.
When the new editor is implemented, do those single-indent bullets become twice-indented bullets?
I sincerely hope not, because that will wreak havoc on hundreds of notes, forcing textwrapping I didn’t want, doubling my intended indents, etc.
On the other hand, in other documents, I have deliberately left my bullets in the gutter, and have sub-bullets below them. If those bullets get indented, I would expect all the sub-bullets to get an additional indent.
What’s the plan for making sure this kind of thing is handled effectively when forcing gutter-bullets to become body-bullets?
There should be a toggle in setting to choose this. Way too many users don’t want the gutter settings to change. Giving the option to choose is a win win for all.
double indented list items aren’t valid in Markdown, so this is something that’s not going to be possible with the new editor.
Concerning the old notes, we’ll try to keep the text as consistent as possible doing the least possible amount of text changes, but for this particular case, we’re probably going to automatically fix all the lists.
I just tried double-indent on a bullet in Panda, and yep, can’t be done. That’s really unfortunate.
So, if I want a bulleted list under some indented text, that list will be further left than the text it’s supposed to be a subset of?
I also notice that Panda doesn’t turn OPT+8 bullets (like •) into Markdown bullets like current Bear does. I’m in the habit of using OPT+8 to make bullets, so what happens to all those bullets in the transition? Do they remain Markdown bullets, or do they get reformatted as • ?
I do a lot of this:
Indenting the text below a header…
• Then indenting…
• …a bulleted list…
• …below that indented text
So is this going to be impossible in Bear 2.0?
And if so, what happens to all my text that is currently formatted this way? Do all those indented lists end up justified left, completely breaking my style?
And if so, what are users who need indented lists supposed to do?
I just pasted the above example into Panda, and the formatting was completely destroyed: Instead of a regular text with bullets, it became code and the bullets became plain old asterisks:
In Bear 2.0, will doing any indenting at all turn text into code? Because that will wreck the formatting of literally all 719 notes I have in Bear, and force me to come up with a whole new note-taking style.
with editor 2.0 we’re going to move 100% to Markdown, this has obviously some side effects (like not allowing indented paragraphs/lists), but overall we decided that having an open and commonly used format outweighs some of the cons.
All the changes you’re seeing are related to Markdown:
indented paragraphs/lists are just not possible as they turn into code
the bullet • is not a valid Markdown list marker, but we could automatically replace that (it’s not on our list, but I’ll talk with the team)
yes, all your examples are not possible in any Markdown editor
As for your current notes, we’re going to automatically de-indent invalid paragraphs/lists, and yes that’s probably going to break your current style.
Your style looks like what outliners do, the only what to achieve that with Markdown is to use lists, like this:
I’m really sorry that those changes are going to disrupt your workflow, we’re just trying to make Bear better and more compatible
Thanks for the detailed response, @matteo. I’m sorry these changes will disrupt me too. Thanks for the tip about outliners, but their rigid structure means I’m always fighting with them to do what I want instead of what the software wants (something I should be used to after 35 years as a Mac user).
Having some experience in development QA, I understand why Bear is going to 100% Markdown, but Markdown has never been great for my note-taking style, and Bear has always been just different enough to work for me — and Bear handles tags better than any other app out there. I’ve pretty much tried them all. I guess I’ll (export/backup first and) wait and see how badly Bear 2.0 ganks my notes, hope for the best, but plan on finding a solution elsewhere.
Maybe another good reason for advanced (style) settings for indenting or outdenting bullets (into the margin) previously suggested in some other threads?
@panda, I doubt there’s going to be any advanced style settings in Bear 2.0. I’m really disappointed to hear how restrictive Markdown will make my favorite notes editor. Bear is losing flexibility, and users will have to do everything the way the software demands, even things as basic as indenting a paragraph, and never color outside the lines. I do understand there are advantages for Bear’s developer in using Markdown, and I know there are some features that using Markdown will bring (tables, footnotes, nested styles), and I know some users are excited about those features. But the features we’re losing are far more valuable to me personally. I’m pretty broken-hearted since I can’t find another notes app that handles tags as well as Bear.
Well the option would be easy to implement; allow a “bear legacy” formatting preference, but in “markdown export” it uses the parser they are going to use for converting bear 1.0 notes —> 2.0 to export valid markdown. Would break this dude’s notes but not his use of bear as an app.
To be fair i’m not personally asking bear developers to do that, just mentioning it. My personal preference is that modified markdown that permitS greater app functionality is preferential over the restrictive dogmas of markdown, but this is a very high level debate in the markup language community and I don’t think its my place to challenge the bear dev team’s design choices.
People treat “portability” and open apps like they are weather proof bags whose minimalist design is justified by their durability; I don’t really perceive “valid markup” — either html or markdown — with such a survivalist mentality; if the internet crashes or your power goes out you are dependent on more than just how a proprietary app exports your data. But this is an age old debate; i mean part of why I like javascript more than python is because of my feelings about tabs and indents (or pug… like OP, I don’t like being restricted by whitespace sensitivity); valid scripting and markup is a very coveted and deeply-held design preference and bear devs are totally justified to update the app in accordance with their preferences for portable, valid markdown (although ironic, since didn’t they invent textbundle to overcome the limitations of “valid markdown” files?)
Perhaps one way to achieve the goal would be to ask if they’ll open source bear 1.0 and allow you to compile it to keep using this version, but i doubt that would fly well!! Haha,
