Workspaces in Bear?

Beta Panda Feedback
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I love Bear and I love what you’re doing with it, please keep up the amazing work! This feedback isn’t about the new features in the Alpha, I’m excited to see them ship someday in Bear. This is rather about a new feature request.

See, just like everyone else, I probably collect over a dozen notes every day. These are work notes, personal notes, my knowledge notes, shopping lists, whatever. Work and personal notes can be (should be?) short lived, especially if you’re managing a GTD-type system where you send notes first to an Inbox, process them, and then eventually archive/delete them once their utility is over. Or you don’t, that’s up to you. Similarly you’ll usually just delete your grocery list once you’re back from shopping.

But if you’re using Bear as your knowledge graph as well — and Bear’s note linking feature is almost good enough to build your own Zettelkasten in it — you’ll likely never delete your notes. In fact, you’ll keep building upon the same notes over and over until you’ve perfected them. And then one day you’ll have collected enough material to write a book from it, hopefully.

I think it’s clear that these are two very different use cases that Bear enables but currently doesn’t provide a way to segregate. Yes, the tagging system is outstanding and extremely useful, but it doesn’t help me separate my areas of concern (persona/work/journal/knowledge) where I’d like to keep each of these worlds apart — and ideally without causing tag collisions. Similarly, I would also like to switch Bear to exclusively show my work notes in an office setup and not lay bare my personal/inner life to my coworkers. Or simply, when I just want to focus on a particular type of work, or set of notes, or an aspect of my life for doing some focused work. In fact, I’m currently forcing myself to try Obsidian because I want to maintain exactly this kind of a separation in my knowledge graph from the rest of my notes.

This can be made possible if Bear let me choose different workspaces/vaults/folders or whatever you may call it to keep different types of notes in completely different places. This would make a tremendous impact on the way I (and I’m sure others) use Bear. Please do consider it if possible and keep up the awesome work. Thanks!

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I wrote this post a long time ago, hoping it receives some traction. I’d like to bump this thread again in the hope that the Bear devs/community mods take note and maybe comment on this with what they think about this request? Thanks!

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I hadn’t seen this post but fundamentally agree, thanks for bumping @prashaantt ! It would probably only take like adding a column and a table to the sqlite database and a slight modification to the view to achieve and would dramatically help me. Currently i actually use a second app for work notes because otherwise my search results in bear (like most people, i find it way easier to just search glubally than to find a tag and search under that heading) are not very specific to matching my query.

I understand how tags work, however, Here is my use case: i collect a ton of notes at work but also for research. When at work, i want to search for things that i saved for work, but in research want to search for research, but the same terms might be tagged in both.

Obviously i could make a ‘research’ and ‘work’ tag, but mentally it’s just confusing because you can’t pin tags and so i don’t want to scroll all my tags to find the tag (my actual work isn’t in tech or programming and requires quick access to information, and bear’s excellent search is why i originally adopted the platform) i am using to sort between work and research.

Workspaces would dramatically help me, but i’ve never really felt it appropriate to ask since no one else seems to deeply want them

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I originally had thought that workspace is not needed, but as I continue to use Bear for multiple purposes I started to agree on this concept. Although one small wish is that I would like to be able to hide the workspace name as I am not a big fan of the ‘account’ image showing every where on my screen. :stuck_out_tongue:
It is a very nifty and minor visuals that I like about Bear haha.

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while this is hot. I agree, workspaces would be very nice! like personal and work. My current work around is using a tag “me” and a tag “work” then all other tags fall under as subtags. this works but is not ideal because I can’t really use the Notes, Untagged, Todo, Today, Locked buttons and stay within my fake workspaces.

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As someone who really wants workspaces, i think it’s fair to point out that to my understanding, this forum is supposed to be about improving the panda editor itself, not overall bear, so I can understand if the devs want to focus only on issues raised with the editor’s development. And workspaces might simply be antithetical to the overall design principles that bear devs cherish.

For those interested, the app betterthings (far less featured than bear overall; i only use it for a narrow usecase of logging cases that I’d rather do in bear but keep separate for reasons i outlined above) implements workspaces very well

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Ooh yes,

seems to do the workspace in a very clean fashion. :smiley:

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I totally agree with that request. Workplaces, Notebooks or how ever you want to call them are useful to seperate things that don’t belong together.

There are furthermore desirable sideeffects of workplaces or notebooks. They help to prevent endless list of notes in the notes-list or a huge collection of tags in the left sidebar. It would help to have a better overview.

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Hi @prashaantt

Thank you for the initial post, and for giving it a bump! It sparked an interesting discussion within the team.

Long story short, it’s not a feature that we’re planning to implement in the short term.

It would be nice to have and it’s something we can re-visit and re-discuss amongst the team after 2.0 to see if it would make sense for Bear.

Hoping this helps!

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To add a voice to this discussion: for a long time, I thought I didn’t need workspaces in Bear. Recently, however, I was thinking about some content I keep in plain text files on iCloud as opposed to Bear, and I realized that the reason is exactly the lack of workspaces. There are some self-contained areas I don’t want to mix with my other content. E.g., I write fiction, and it makes zero sense to have background information for my fictional world to mix with real-life knowledge I keep in Bear.

An additional concern is the size of the Bear database. If I added everything I keep elsewhere to Bear, the size of the database would likely grow to some 50 GB which can’t be good for performance.

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Yeah, i personally prefer workspaces, but bear added all the other stuff i wanted in 2.0 so not as upset not to have them. However, as a result bear is limited only to notes for work. I’d probably use it for more than just work with workspaces, but it’s great for quickly adding and finding work stuff so no complaints

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Workspaces are a great feature for an evident reason:

  • You keep stuff seperated that don’t belong to each other

That leads to so many advantages:

  • In every part of the ui i have a better overview. Why someone should want a notelist where recipes, study notes, own storys, projects or whatever is mixed?

  • Workspaces would drastically help to clean up the mess and clutter from the left sidebar. Not only that the amount of tags per workspace would decrease. Also each workspace would have a different tagging system: Currently i either have to choose ONE tagging system (PARA, Johnny Decimal or whatever) for ALL stuff. That doesn’t make sense. It is like using a hammer not only for nails but also for screws. Or i have to mix different tagging systems in one view (left sidebar) what causes mess

I would appreciate if @trix180 or @matteo would give some comments to that topic. As far as i see that request is quite popular but so far i haven’t read something from the devs to that. It is easier to live with a disappointment than with a constant hope that is not fulfilled :smiley:

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Your old proposal shows how clean it could be in bear:

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Did you maybe miss the message I was responding to? It was from a person at Bear, and it said what their plans were. But it’s one year old so I guess it wouldn’t hurt to hear the current thoughts on the topic.

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No, i didn’t miss it. But the answer you received was ambiguous:

Long story short, it’s not a feature that we’re planning to implement in the short term.

I have no clear interpretation for that. Is it planned for long term? Hast short term ended one year later or not? Or is it just the polite phrase for: no, we won’t have the feature at all? I do not know

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Hello everyone,

Workspaces is a feature that’s on our list of things to evaluate, we still don’t have a clear position on that.

It’s not planned for the 2.0 launch, we’re trying to wrap the app and release it asap.

Best.

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Thanks for sharing the roadmap. It is understandable that workspace is not planned for 2.0 launch.

Though I still want to add another datapoint to why workspaces are useful. In CraftDocs, you can have multiple workspaces and choose to use sync or local-only storage for each of them separately. This is very useful for storing work related notes separately which might not be allowed to be sync-ed to personal iCloud storage per company policy.

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Workplaces would be a great feature, I would use it to separate my work and personal notes, but it is also not a dealbreaker for me.

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+1 vote from me too. I was about to create a new post for this very topic (workspaces in Bear) but fortunately found this one, and so many upvotes for this make me glad.
I recently saw the importance of this feature when I thought about keeping my study notes in Bear too (I currently keep them in Apple Notes) as backlinks will be really useful for studying. But then had to abandon the plan as I think it will be really weird seeing my study notes all mixed up with my journal entries and shopping lists. Also not to mention, the clutter of innumerable tags it will create.
Would like the devs to give this a serious consideration after Bear 2.0 launch.

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Adding my +1 to this feature.

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