First of all, thanks for the continued work on Bear — it’s a fantastic tool that I use daily for both writing and organizing projects.
I’d like to raise a long-standing request: the ability to resize table columns manually or to support extended Markdown table syntax that allows for column width or alignment control.
I’ve seen older threads where it was mentioned that standard Markdown doesn’t allow this — and that’s true — but several widely adopted Markdown extensions (such as Pandoc, MultiMarkdown, and GitHub Flavored Markdown) now support richer table formatting, including column alignment and, in some cases, styling hints.
Here’s a basic example using :---: for alignment:
| Name | Age | Description |
|:-----------|:---:|---------------------------------|
| Alice | 30 | Senior developer at the company |
| Bob | 45 | Team lead |
This approach is already recognized in tools like Obsidian, Typora, and many static site generators. Some even allow manual resizing in the UI for better readability.
Even if manual column resizing is not feasible right now, support for column alignment and adaptive wrapping would already make a huge difference for readability and formatting.
Thanks again for listening and for building such a focused, elegant writing tool. I’d love to see Bear continue evolving as the best Markdown editor on Apple platforms!
Bear already supports column alignment, if you copy-paste your table inside the app you’ll see that the second column is centered
I’d like more information about this, can you provide some examples or point me to an app that’s doing it?
As for manual resizing, Markdown’s table spec is pretty minimal. We could come up with a custom solution, but it would only work in Bear, and we usually try to keep the editor as Markdown-compatible as possible.
If you’ve seen other Markdown apps doing this, we’d love to check them out!
OK I didn’t know that I could keep horiz alignment… thats good.
But I’m mostly interested to manually resize colum size (dropbox paper has this feature), for example I made a table into paper, than I manually resized columns but if I copy the table to Bear I loose the custom columd width…
Yes, that’s because Dropbox Paper doesn’t retain column alignment information in its Markdown export. I’m not aware of any Markdown editors that support that feature, and to be honest, it’s not something we’re actively researching at the moment.
I would also really appreciate the ability to manually resize individual columns in a table for better viewing of the information I deem most pertinent, but I can also appreciate the value the dev’s place on universal markdown compatibility. Hopefully this will be a feature that is added to the common mark standard in the future and can be implemented in Bear.
