I really love the Archive functionality in Bear. There are some notes I want to keep, but I don’t want them to clutter the Search, Quick Open or Tags.
The only thing I would change, is that if those archived notes have links to other notes, I can see the archived notes in the backlinks.
My use case: I use the archive functionality with sources, for example, I save an article with the web clipper, I could then link that article to some notes I have on related subjects. Then I would archive the article. After this, when I go to the related notes I can see the article as a reference, where I can expand my knowledge on the topic.
With the current implementation if you have a lot of archived notes it gets very messy, you have no way to organize them, and you forget about them because they don’t connect to the rest of the notes.
My second question is regarding the limitation of the editing of archived notes. In my use case, I don’t really edit them much, but do we really need it to be this way? Is the fact that they cannot be edited, improve the performance of archived notes? If it is performance related, I like it. If it really doesn’t add value, I would prefer to have the ability to edit them.
I ran a test on this idea. I create note A and note B and backlink them to each other. Then I archive note B. I go back to note A in my main note list and the link is there and works as normal, but it doesn’t show the backlink to note B, whereas if I go to note B in my archive and click on the backlink to note A, it takes me to that note, and the backlink does show up in the info panel in note B. Strange behavior. The backlink should show on both notes especially if they work regardless if the note is in the archive or not.
For those notes that you only “edit” once in awhile, Bear notes app has a “Read-Only Mode” to prevent accidental edits. To enable it, open a note, tap the “…” menu, and select “More > Make Read-Only”. A read-only icon will appear, and you can make the note editable again by clicking or tapping that icon and selecting “Make Editable”.
I’m not sure if I understood you correctly, but I suspect that you misunderstood the concept of backlinks. If you create a link from note a to note b, then the link in note a is an outgoing link to note b, but not a backlink from note b. What you call “backlinking to each other” simply did not exist. A link just works in one direction