Panda has really good YAML front matter support, and I’m wondering whether Bear 2.0 will utilize it in any way? (It’s really a question to the team regarding their design thoughts.)
I would love it if we could use it as a kind of extended tagging system (e.g., if we could search for all notes containing a given key, and/or if we could expose the existing keys similar to a list of tags.)
I hadn’t thought of this before, but I regularly wish I could assign most of the tags to a note without them appearing in the body of the note. This is an obvious scheme for still storing the tags with the textual content of the note, especially for when it was copied/exported, without having to keep them inline in the note body.
Hello. Bear 2 has the YAML front matter support but is not used to extend the tagging system mostly because We don’t want to introduce two different syntaxes for expressing tags.
We have not thought about having the note search work on YAML. Sounds like a very edge use case but We’ll keep it in mind for future developments.
Now that I’ve played around with Bear 2 a bit, I believe we don’t need any special way to search for YAML keys, as searching for “key:” isn’t likely to return too many false positives. And you’re right – it’s an edge case that doesn’t warrant extra development style.
The only thing that might be worth considering is adding some sort of option to add frontmatter from the UI (e.g., call it “add metadata” which would create an empty YAML block at the top of the note). Currently, if somebody doesn’t have the insider knowledge that frontmatter is supported, the app doesn’t tell them.
This might be a good idea. I’m a little concerned about how because the YAML button will behave in a rather unique way by moving the selection to the being of the note and eventually not being enabled if the YAML is already created. I also think “add metadata” as a label might be equivocated.
Personally I think mentioning in the Bear 2.0 welcome note or first launch splash screen perhaps may be enough. Most people don’t even know what it is and I worry it might cause confusion.