I would find backlinks much more accessible and useful if they were available inline in the note view, especially on iOS. I’m looking at apps like Craft and Reflect as examples.
3 Likes
I know this was debated a lot, and not all agree. I do. I think the same way they’ve handled the note metrics and the ability to turn them on and off would be elegant. Or even allowing a “pin” of the entire “i” menu.
Not critical, but I use Bear for a lot of my recurring meeting notes. It would be great to be able to see the log and swiftly open linked assets, but not something I always want to see.
4 Likes
I agree that hiding this information away behind a modal that always disappears makes Bear sub-optimal for a workflow that is very heavy on backlinks, as mine is. The issue is that, when looking at a note, there is no way for me to know whether I need to look at the backlinks panel (i.e., it has related documents with incoming links) without opening the panel itself. If I always need to manually open that panel on every single note, it adds a lot of unnecessary friction.
I noticed that in screenshots/mockups of Panda that this issue is solved. A pane can be made always visible on the right (something common in apps like Obsidian and Reflect), as suggested by the OP. I do hope something like this can be incorporated into Bear.
However, @matteo, if for whatever reason that solution isn’t favored, I would like to propose an easy an unobtrustive interim/alternate solution, which would work for my scenario at least. Bear could simply add “Backlinks” and provide a count of incoming backlinks as an option in the stats bar. This would at least let me know when looking at a document that I need to open up and look at the Backlinks panel—and, most importantly, would save me the trouble of doing so when there are 0 inbound links.
Thanks!
2 Likes
Incidentally, I’m aware that you can drag the stats panel out of the app window now, but that’s rather visually inelegant (especially since on long lists of backlinks, it runs down off the bottom edge of my screen), and I’m experiencing the known bug that whenever a new note is opened the panel moves down a little bit, such that eventually it too would entirely run off the screen.
+1 on this feature request.