New to Bear and finding it almost perfect for my needs. One challenge I’ve had is creating a soft return in text that keeps lines together without extra paragraph spacing. There may be other ways I haven’t found, but today I copied and pasted some text with soft returns from Google Docs to Bear and was surprised to see Bear respected the formatting. So I selected one of those line break characters in Bear, copied it, and pasted it into some other text, and it created a soft return with no extra paragraph spacing.
What is this mystery character and how do I create it from the keyboard on MacOS?
Apparently even works in this forum editor:
Everything to the East of here is sacred.
Everything to the South of here is sacred.
Everything to the West of here is sacred.
Everything to the North of here is sacred.
Everything above here is sacred.
Everything below here is sacred.
Everything all around here is very very sacred.
– American Indian ritual invocation
Use text replacement to insert a soft return:
- First select a soft return and copy it to your Clipboard (you can select the soft return at the end of one of the lines of text above)
- On the Mac, go to Apple menu > Settings > Keyboard and press the Text replacements… button under Text Input
- Click the + at the bottom left to add a text replacement
- In the Replace field, enter the text you want to use to trigger the text replacement. My preference is to use a period followed by text. I used " .sr" (without the quotes)
- in the With field, paste the soft return that’s on your Clipboard. You will not see a character appear since a soft return is an invisible character.
- Press Done
- Go to Bear, enter a line of text, and at the end type the trigger you entered in the Replace field, then press Space to activate the trigger
- Your cursor will move to the beginning of the next line without additional paragraph spacing above it.
Note that multiple lines of text separated by soft returns are treated as a single paragraph. If you triple-click on any of the text, all of the lines will be selected as a single paragraph.
If you have other Apple devices connected to the same Apple account, the text replacement should work on each of them. So if you type some text, the trigger, and a space on your iPhone or iPad, it should insert a soft return in the same way. When I tested this on my iPhone, it didn’t work unless I put a space before the trigger, apparently because I use a dot (.) at the start of my trigger and Bear interprets this as part of a URL if it follows other text.
If there’s an easier keyboard combination already available on Mac to enter a soft return in Bear, I haven’t. found it. Even if there is, it probably would not work on iPhone or iPad keyboards, which lack modifier keys like Cmd, Ctrl, and Option. Text replacement seems the best solution across all devices.