I’d like an easy way to show and hide the markdown indicators. So when toggled to hide the *, _, link icons would disappear. The formatting should stay just the typed out markdown.
I like having markdown as a much faster way to write formatted notes, but I don’t need it when I’m going back and reviewing them.
Thanks!
It’s not what you’re looking for, but it might be a solution that you find works for your personal workflow: On the Mac version today (release, not beta) there’s an option under the Note dropdown menu to Preview in Marked. I mostly do this with finished documents that I use from other Markdown apps (my text editor or Drafts) rather than the notes that are constantly changing in Bear, but if you’re using Bear for a lot of finished notes, maybe Marked can be helpful.
I know a lot of people use Bear as a basic drafting tool for notes that go somewhere else. If I’m going to pick Bear back up it needs to be where the notes can live. So, I’d really want to be able to toggle the markdown on and off without having to transition/share the note. iA Writer has that function and it’s great.
I back that idea. I’m pretty sure I’ve submitted it a few months ago as well. Now that styling enters headings it’s even more apparent as markdown stands out more. A keyboard shortcut for toggling markdown visibility would be great.
Around this idea. The ability to set a Note to presentation mode (without markdown perhaps as readonly) as well as a view that is more of a traditional syntax colored MD text (for examining tables, todos, etc.) would both be useful for the full lifecycle of notes.
I would especially appreciate a feature like this if “off” truly meant “off”. I really don’t want Bear to hide the heading indicators, link URLs, or other details of the markdown. If I can’t see them, it’s much more cumbersome to edit them.
Bear/Panda are hybrid Markdown editors, we want some part of the md to be hidden (long links, heading, etc…), this is they road we’ve chosen and it’s probably going to stay.
@matteo: Thank you, this is good news! 
If I wanted a pure MD-Editor, I could find many in the App-Store and the Internet for probably less money and if Bear would develop in that direction I would certainly cancel my subscription.
For me, Bear is an app that allows me to take my daily notes comfortably - because of MD - with a nice and easy way to organize them. I keep my notes in Bear and I seldom export them into another format, so I want my notes look good and to be easily read within Bear. Therefore a hybrid solution that hides the MD-syntax when not in editing Mode is the way I would like Bear to further develop to. Another way could be a syntax on/off-switch or -shortcut.
Agree with the others. I think an app like Typora found a good balance between keeping the markdown and having a text easy to read. I would be happy if the dev decided to follow that path
+1.
markdown is very useful but it is distracting when combined with WYSIWYG rendering. I think many people would prefer one or the other but not both at the same time. Make it optional and you’ll make everyone happy 
cheers,
-tomek
If Hybrid is the way, an option to turn if off and on would be great from users point of view.
I really hope Bear team look into this. As quite a few folks are requesting it!
I’ve seen some editors when you are in a paragraph the Markdown appears but then… when your cursor moves… the mark down notations disappear and you are left with a formatted text. That would be really nice so less switching between Markdown preview on and off.
Aside from the high development cost of this, let me chime in with the case for it staying the way it is.
I agree with Bear’s design decision on this. The flipping back and forth is cumbersome and an interface only a programmer could love (code <-> view).
However, I do wish that some of the symbols indicating the markdown be even less intrusive (especially since bold now has two * around it) so that the approximation to final presentation is as clean and close to WYSIWYG as possible while still being easily editable. I like the new header icon because of this (and suggest H4-H6 be different).
I’ve installed Typora and gave it a try and I must say it’s a really nice implementation where markdown only shows when the cursor is on a word or sentence that has markup.
Really clean and easy on the eyes. Wouldn’t mind is the devs gave it their consideration to add this as an option in prefs (or a shortcut toggle).
I don’t see how what we’re asking for would be a hugely expensive piece of code. We’re not asking for a mutually exclusive WYSIWYG and MD modes. We’re asking for a way to optionally hide the MD markup and only show the rendered output. The suggestion that markup should be be shown when editing a particular piece of text is excellent.
Markup code is very useful and I don’t want to get rid of this excellent piece of functionality. I just want to be able to hide it as it is very distracting.
+1 I just played around with Typora upon reading this comment, and after only a few minutes, I love the implementation. It hides what I consider the ugly MD markup, and keeps all of the benefits of MD and “real-time” editing, without the horrifying back-n-forth of code/view modes. Kudos to the Typora design team, and I URGE Bear to consider this for Editor 2.0… I know it means starting from scratch probably yet again, but highly highly encouraged. Typora also, incidentally, addresses my other suggestions: (this is HUGE) proper search highlighting in the sidebar of all terms found, even when there are multiple within a single document; as well as automatically generating TOC optionally within the document but always available using a drop-down menu.
I’m one of those (awful) people who don’t care at all about markdown but love Bear, so I totally understand the annoying thing about folks like me complaining about an app doing right what it is supposed to do.
The fact is, Bear’s team made one of the best note taking app out there (if not the best), each time I want to switch because of the visible MD I come back for all the rest. So yeah I’ll continue to advocate for it, especially since Bear’s team never stopped to make us dream about making it reality one day.
Like other folks here I must agree that the way Typora handles it is really awesome, clean and seamless, far better than apps with toggles or reading mode.
Hello everyone!
The last update introduced an optional way to hide Markdown -> Panda release notes 1.0(532) - Markdown Hiding and Headers
Let us know how do you feel about it and what can we do to improve it 
Best.
This is EXACTLY how I imagined this feature would work. Thank you!