I often want to know what level heading is being used. Currently I need to click on each line to get the style icon to pop up. This is time consuming.
Is it possible to show the style icons permanently, rather than just on the current line? The space is currently unused.
Thanks
The styling is different, at least by default. It’s true that when you can edit styles, this could be a problem if you choose to make them look very similar, such as having the same font size.
@kirkmc that assumes the user can distinguish H1…H4 by mere eyeballing.
From an accessibility perspective, it makes sense to at least consider showing more than just tastefully larger text for headings. The # are hidden after all, so you can’t count.
@bearly-awake would you personally think hovering instead of having to clicking could help? Not that this is the better idea, just to imagine what modus you’re in when you want to know the level. (For example I would not love that because I’d need to reach for a mouse first but that’s just me)
I have already complained about this a few times in some Bear threads, that Level 4 through 6 headings are impossible to tell apart. Okay, they don’t come up often in short notes, but in longer texts there are definitely times when you need them.
It doesn’t matter what solution you come up with, but the main thing is that this issue gets fixed somehow.
I guess that’s better, but it feels like searching a cave by the narrow beam of a flashlight. My ideal would be a command key to “show styles” and then the styles would be displayed in the left margin as shown below:
My use case is:
Thanks
I agree that that font is too tiny. I think there could be a more elegant way of displaying this info. The three lines aren’t useful at all.
I always preferred Bear’s original markings for Headings. Those 3 lines never really made sense to me.
Thanks for the feedback, the zoom thing especially helps me get the problem.
Quick bit of background: the editor is a hybrid WYSIWYG. When your cursor is on a heading line you get the explicit info, otherwise (like in any other rich editor) the cue is just the heading styling itself (font size, weight, etc.)
That’s our current design, and aside from maybe reconsidering the icon, we don’t really have plans to change the approach right now. Just being straight with you 
One bit of history on the icon: we actually moved away from a plain “h1”/“h2” marker because people kept mistaking it for editable text and got confused. So a pure text/number indicator caused its own mess, so that’s part of why it looks the way it does now.
How do you find Pages or Word handle it? They lean on styling alone too, so I’d love to know what works better for you there as it might help us think about the zoomed-in case, which is a fair point.
In my long experience working with text in a variety of apps, and helping people troubleshoot, few people use proper styles in Word or Pages. Most of them manually format font size, weight, etc. Using actual styles is limited either to power users, or to use cases where a company has enforced them. (Such as publishers, who give you a .dot document containing a set of styles.)
Markdown is different, since there are no styles other than headings. I think most people who use markdown are just used to seeing # ## ###, etc.
I don’t think you have a lot of options. If you want to be wysiwyg, then you need to figure out an icon that is readable, but doesn’t suggest that it’s editable. Because most markdown text editors just let you add more # characters to change the style, which isn’t the case here. You have to click the icon to change the H level.
What about gray, square icons with numbers, as you have in the contextual menu? That doesn’t look editable.
Not OP but I think the inherent problem is that the styles are too similar and that 6 levels of headings are very hard to be at-a-glance-distinguishable unless they use additional styling besides just font-size (eg different weights, font styles (eg small caps), colors, and font-decorations (eg underlining, italics, etc)).
Rtf editors use all these features and normally don’t deal with as many heading levels so the problem doesn’t really come up
I can confirm that this is true. Styles are an afterthought in most settings where text needs to be produced but not also typeset.
I’m curious if you ever considered using # symbols and numbers (#1, #2, #3) etc.
Word shows it in two different ways. The first way (which I quite like) is the “Style Gallery” which is just below the menu bar. It serves two purposes: you can quickly change a style by pressing the button, plus you can see the active style because the highlighting of the buttons changes depending on the current cursor position. In the screenshot below, the cursor is in a Heading 2, so the “Heading 2” button lights up.
The second way Word shows it is in the “Styles Pane” which you can open on the right hand side of the window. There, you can see the current style in two ways: the drop-down box at the top, and in the list of styles where it puts a blue box around the current style. Sadly, I can’t see the latter because I can’t discern light blue from light grey when the border line is so thin.
In the sprit of the first option above, perhaps Lettera’s formatting bar could be made a little wider and instead of having the “H” dropdown, it could have H1 H2 H3 H4 buttons that light up based on where the cursor is. Ideally the formatting bar could be configurable so that the user can select which (say) 10 buttons they want to display, because I would gladly sacrifice some of the existing buttons for a full suite of heading buttons that light up to indicate what heading level I’m on.
I would personally prefer the current WYSIWYG editor in Bear where heading levels are hidden by default when you’re not on the relevant line, and if you want to see the text hierarchy you can look at the page summary / table of contents!
The table of contents takes up a lot of screen space. It’s not the best solution, aside from navigating very long and complex documents.
Would prefer not to have this a permanent feature to avoid visual clutter!
