Theming Recommendations to Improve Delight

[AnthonyBaker]

Hey folks — absolutely adore Bear, and have also been an Obsidian user. I wanted to make some recommendations on theming that I think could be helpful to your users (myself included). You guys have nailed so many wonderful details and provide so much delight, but I think there’s further you could go in making readability easier.

I’ve been recently tweaking an Obsidian theme (Cupertino, which is relative new but designed to be very MacOS friendly), looking to create something that is very pleasing to the eye, easy to scan, and nice to read. As a Bear fan I’m trying to mirror some of what I enjoy about the Bear presentation of text, but with subtle changes to improve on it.

In the shot below you’ll see Bear (Dark Notes) on the left and then my tweaked Obsidian Cupertino theme on the right. There’s similarities, but it’s the differences I’d like to call out, making a request that you folks consider doing something similar:

1. Not sure if it’s possible, but the weight of BOLD text matters in how much it visibly pops. Here I’m using 650, versus 400 for normal text. The intent is to make bold stand out more.
2. I think most of your themes have the color of all non-header text be the same as the body text. I do recommend having bold text be more distinct than that — in my case it’s full white, while the body text is CSS HEX bdbbbb. Again, it really has it stand out.
3. I’ve kept the italics weight to something closer to the body weight, but I am using full white to have it stand out. Again, increasing the ease of readability.
4. I think this has been mentioned before, but it is a bit of a bummer you can’t control the line height of lists separately from that of paragraphs. Lists tend to work better with closer spacing, while paragraphs with larger spacing. But NOT the same values.

Thanks for listening and would love any feedback from you or others.

Cheers!

[Atharva]

Hi can you please tell what font is that in bear?

[AnthonyBaker]

I’m using Inter Regular for the body text, Monospace Krypton for the code font, and then SF Pro Rounded Heavy for the headers. This is on desktop, iOS and iPad OS. For the mobile devices I use the app iFont to load the fonts to the devices and they then become available in the font settings within Bear.

You can pretty much set up any combination of custom fonts consistently across devices this way.

[matteo]

@AnthonyBaker

Thanks for listening and would love any feedback from you or others.

That’s nice! I’ll see what I can do

[AnthonyBaker]

Thanks! It would be amazing if you folks could accommodate something like this. It does make a big difference, even though the changes are subtle. Appreciate the response and let me know if you need anything else in support of this.