Suggestions and feedback from a university student

Bear feedback
, , ,
1

I’ve been a Bear user for a while and wanted to share my appreciation along with some suggestions for improvement.

Bear has become my go-to app for note-taking, especially for university work. Bear has made the studying process way simpler and enjoyable. I’ve tried various note-taking apps like Notion, Obsidian, and Evernote, but Bear stands out for me due to its simplicity, privacy focus, and cross-platform access.

Here are a few suggestions:

  • It would be great if Bear could open to a specific note directly (I know there’s a shortcut workaround, but a built-in feature would be ideal).
  • While I like the range of themes, most of the dark themes don’t stand out compared to the light themes. Some of them are even unusable for studying because the text blends into the background. The newly added Catpuccin theme is nice, but the ability to create custom themes would be even better. I’m aware of the desktop workaround, but it’s not the most elegant solution.
  • More colours for the highlighter tool would be very helpful for organising and differentiating notes visually.

I’ve also encountered a bug, possibly related to localisation. When writing dates in the Czech format (e.g., 18. 7. 2024), Bear automatically converts them into ordered lists. Unlike Notion, where hitting cmd+Z stops the formatting, there doesn’t seem to be a fix for this in Bear. This makes writing in my native language frustrating.

And finally, I want to share features that are vital to me and would bring Bear closer to perfection. I know some of these have been discussed and are not current priorities, but I hope they will be reconsidered as many users, including myself, are asking for them.

  • Tabs: Navigating multiple notes can be quite clumsy. Although it’s possible to open notes in separate windows, this approach becomes impractical when working with more than two notes. As a student trying to stay organised, this is a significant challenge for me.
  • Merging cells: While you can manually input the same value into cells, it’s not an ideal solution.
  • LaTeX: Though it might not be useful for everyone, as a CompSci student, having LaTeX support would be incredibly helpful for math notes.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

2 Likes
2

For 1. Try the widget. Or else I’m not sure what you want to achieve.
For merging cells, it’s an issue with markdown spec.

3

Hey! First of all thank you for your kind words. :heart: Next, to answer some of your questions and requests:

It would be great if Bear could open to a specific note directly

Single note widget was born to do this! Just add it to your screen and then you can open the note you want with one tap. You can find more information and the instruction here.

the ability to create custom themes would be even better

Currently we don’t have plans to add this, but if you see any nice dark themes somewhere, let us know on forum and we will take into consideration for future themes!

More colours for the highlighter tool would be very helpful

It is on our todo list, check this post and let us know what you think! :wink:

When writing dates in the Czech format (e.g., 18. 7. 2024), Bear automatically converts them into ordered lists.

Unfortunately number + . + space is the Markdown rule for ordered list. As a Markdown notes app we are unable to change this. That being said, you can use the escaping character backlash \ before the first . to disable it, like this: 18\. 7. 2024. In this way the dates won’t convert into ordered lists.

Tabs

Currently we don’t have plans to add tabs, but soon we will support the new window tilting feature on macOS Sequoia and hopefully it helps to easily organize multiple notes windows on Mac for you!

Merging cells

Unfortunately Markdown tables is very basic and within the rules we are unable to support advanced table features like merging cells. :frowning:

LaTeX

This is something we’d really like to support, but it is quite challenging and time consuming. There are a lot of things we need to consider from dependency management to performance concerns and compatibility. Currently this is not our top priority, but we will continue our research. :slight_smile:

Thank you again for your support, these are all great feedback and we are so grateful to have you in our community! Let us know if you have any other feedback or questions! :bear: :heart: :student:

3 Likes