The “Note from Selection” feature is really handy. A couple of suggestions:
For me it would be even better if it moved the content into a new note instead of copying, since I have to navigate back to the source note and delete the duplicated content. (Maybe even an option to replace the moved content with an internal link)
Would there be a way to copy across tags from the source note when they’re not part of the selected text?
It would feel intuitive to me to also have the “Note from Selection” command in the context menu, just like the other operations that work on a selection.
@point 1
I totally agree with both aspects: deleting moved content and replacing with an internal link if desired
The question is how to transform that into ui since there are 3 options: 1. just copying, 2. copying and deleting, 3. copying and placing internal link. Three commands in the context menu? Or a window for interaction? But yes, for me that would be useful
The simplest approach might be just to nest the three options under the “Note From Selection” menu item.
Similar to how Copy As and Paste From are currently implemented. Then the user has the option to set up custom keyboard shortcuts in macOS System Settings for the commands they use a lot.
Note From Selection > Copy to New Note ⇧⌘ N
Move to New Note
Move and Link to New Note
√ Keep Tags
If you move and link then the link needs a name to be placed. But what is the name of the link or of the new note?
What tags do you like to be taken over to the new note? I assume you work just with a few tags that are furthermore note related. I on the contrary have a heavy usage of tags: I tag headings, quotes or whatever, I have inline tags or I use tags that acts as temporal bookmarks. It wouldn‘t make sense to take all the tags of the source note. The less tags you have on the other side the more it is acceptable to set tags manually in the new note. Also that feature could lead to confusion of other users. While I may disagree in that point, I support the three other commands. But to be honest, that is a nice-to-have but not something essential as each task can be accomplished easily and relatively quick with simple steps: copy/cut → create new note → paste. As you said going back to set an internal link is actually the only what is a little bit cumbersome
Unless I’m mistaken, Bear uses the first line of a note as its name and any links to it will update dynamically.
Sounds like my tagging is indeed more modest. Even though Bear lets me create inline tags, the tags themselves are associated with note, at least as far they’re implemented for filtering, search, etc.
My use case for “Move to New Note” is simply when writing about a subject and a “sub-subject” gets big enough that it warrants its own note. In such cases, I’d almost always want the “sub-subject” to initially take on the same tags as the source subject.
Tagging parts of a note individually sounds intriguing but is not something I’ve explored in Bear. Conceptually that style of tagging is something I’d associate more with a block-based model, or an outliner.
Do this test: create an empty note, copy the link to it and place that link in another note. You will get an markdown link rather than a wiki link because the title is missing. Adding a title afterwards doesn’t change the name of the mark-down link and certainly not transforms the markdown link to a wiki link. That means you NEED a title to prevent this. But using the copied text as title is somehow an ugly solution. I cannot see here an elegant solution without opening a window for giving a name for new note
I know. But how should the app know about your purpose to use that function?
So my imagined Move to and Link to New Note would need to create a wiki link instead of a markdown link. Usually the content I would be moving would begin with a header, so that would be perfect for the link label, but I agree it gets ugly when moving a long paragraph. I’d actually be fine with Bear truncating long wiki link labels, but that’s another discussion.
Would you expect the new note to open immediately? I think that’s what I would expect. If that were the case then it would be quite straight-forward to change the title.
In the context of this thread i tried something and i am not sure if it is a bug. So i would like to let you know.
In bear 2 (which unlike bear 1 has not the command me and patthedog was talking about here) i tried following:
I selected a whole paragraph and then i typed by hotkey “alt+5” double brackets around the selection. After that i created the new note by clicking on the new wiki link. As expected a new note was created with the selection as title. At last i removed the title of this new note from the first line and set a new title. I expected that the wiki link from the source note is changed but it wasn’t. Actually in bear 2 - when a linked note becomes unnamed - the source note takes the id of the linked note as name and changes back to a wiki link again if the linked note gets a name
Can you please make a quick video of the issue and/or report the note original note title? I think it might be caused by some special tittle conditions but it’s almost impossible to guess what it’s the cause.
I guess it is the total length of the selection. In the video at first you see the bug i mentioned above. In the second part of the video - with a shorter selection - everything works expected.
