Bear is closer to Evernote than Simplenote, I’d agree. But is the right app for storing “20,000 receipts and 8,000 PDF’s” in the cloud, like you can in Evernote?
That’s interesting, as I have thought of Evernote in past as an “everything bucket or online file system” (roughly translating their advertising copy) than a “PKM” with backlinks and a knowledge graph, like Obsidian.
I wouldn’t want Bear to get too complicated; otherwise it’d be slow.
Don‘t worry, it won‘t get complicated by adding workspaces as long as it is not implemented like in obsidian or craft. The first one reminds of exploring a file browser as obsidian is file based and the second one is full of team related stuff. A simple switcher in the left sidebar and a dialog called from main menu to add or remove a workspace is totally enough.
In turn, once we have a reduced and clean tag tree structure in left sidebar the navigation becomes friendlier, less chunky and more equipped with better overview.
Generally, I’m in favor of the concept of workspaces. But I must say that even without any collaboration/team stuff, or folder/file on top of tags, there’s still a possibility things could get complicated – the wiki-links themselves.
My concerns are primarily regarding how wiki-links and related behaviors would be handled if workspaces are in place and cross-workspace linking & moving notes across workspaces are allowed.
I also then asked myself: what do I really want when I talk about workspaces? And really, for the most part, I just would like to have a few presets of tags that would show up together on the sidebar and for my search scope. So really, at least for myself, I would ask for views of my tag tree and saved search scope.
I’m curious about what others are thinking about when they say they want workspaces. Like exactly what workflow or use case they would like to have that may or may not require workspaces. And I am hopeful that these would be useful for the dev team too!
Simple solution: workspaces remain totally independent. If someone wants to link a pasta recipe to a meeting note which is linked to whatever else could remain in one workspace.
In my eyes it is absurd to wish to separate the different areas from each other and then to create any kind of connections between them again.
That’s certainly a possibility, and I hope it’s going to be implemented that way if the workspace function arrives in Bear 2.X.
However, some questions still remain. Such as whether wiki-links should break if a note is moved to another workspace and if they should reconnect if the note is moved back.
Adding workspaces will introduce some complexity, but my goal here isn’t to reject the workspace concept altogether. In fact, the idea of having workspaces or a way to elegantly and cleanly display subsets of tags or notes is appealing.
These discussions can be helpful for both workspace enthusiasts, who can consider the potential complexities and consequences, and for others who want to better understand the true intentions behind the concept. By focusing on specific use cases rather than a broadly-defined term (workspace), it’s more likely that the development team will understand what features to implement to best serve users.
I hope the devs will implement workspaces at all. I cannot imagine that matteo or trix180 will allow such a weird interaction between workspaces that - as far as I know - even doesn‘t exist in obsidian.
But how would you copy one note to another workspace if the workspaces are independent and separated? And why should you? 
I would keep it simple*. If someone really wants to copy a note to another workspace he could export it to markdown and import it into the other workspace. But this would be two different notes with same content.
*by simple i mean: also no settings or preferences are changed - they remain global
I think everyone who needs workspaces know why they need them. But to be honest, i have no motivation to persuade other users who just need one workspace - they just should know that we don’t want something that stands in their way. The arguments should be directed to the devs so that they can decide if an implementation is worth the work. As far as i can see here in this forum the workspaces are one of the mostly desired features
I don’t like the idea of workspaces in terms of workflow – tags can do a better job for most situations. But, I do expect someday I’ll have a contract where I’m asked to keep related notes in a separate database. Bear is such an important tool to my workflow now, I don’t know how I’d respond to such a request. Having the ability to run multiple databases would be a nice to have for such situations.
Sorry, can you just confirm that you have over 4500 notes amounting to 87GB of material stored inside Bear?
At the moment I have 4962 notes with a database size of 77 GB.
Many soundfiles and video files.
You don’t start with a workflow but with a goal or purpose which in turn makes it necessary to create a workflow which is the best and most convenient for the case. Forcing workspaces on some who doesn’t need them is probably a terrible idea.
In regard to us others maybe a metaphor can bring to point on an abstract level why we want workspaces: It’s not as if we want to store our trousers, shirts, jackets and socks in separate wardrobes. In fact, we just want to keep our clothes, CDs, books and food separate.
Crikey! That’s impressive
Why use an alternate program for organization?
I imagine it gives you features you don’t have in Bear, but it also adds an extra step (clip-> read → export vs Clip-> Read)
I don’t use an alternate program, but the person I was replying to might’ve considered it. I was suggesting using an alternate program because I simply like Bear’s web clipper and especially Bear’s editing environment (!!) far better than the comparable features in DEVONthink or EagleFiler.
Bear 2 has back links, but not many other organization features. They are enough for me; some may need more features than Bear may want to provide.
As for why I don’t keep everything in Bear, it’s because I made a decision a while ago not to keep anything synchronized on my phone that I didn’t need in the field, whether work or personal.
Ya, I could definitely see “workspaces” done in a tasteful and unobtrusive way so that users can choose to use it (or not). For example, I’ve used Things task manager for many years, and they have done a great job in making features available that are useful but not forced upon you in any way. You can choose to use them or not.
They use a concept of an Area (areas of interest) that is similar to the workspace concept some have been discussing. It’s a free-form way to group tasks in an area (not a separate database). Tags can also be layered into Areas by adding a tag to it (eg. an Area called Work could also have a #work tag, or include multiple tags). So every time you add a task to that Area the tag automatically applied to it.
Something similar in Bear could prove to be quite useful. In the notes/tags sidebar you could choose to view as Areas, Tags or both (see below).
Where do you expect the list of „areas“ (actually a nice name) to appear in bear? If it would appear exactly like in things app with all its nested child nodes then it is not what I and probably the others expect as it is not a strict separation.
I think @Eleanor has nailed it with that:
It appears on the sidebar, much like the tags do in Bear. It’s mainly a way to group tasks (could be notes for Bear), but Things does not separate meta tags, so they are ubiquitous across the application and Areas. With that said, it wouldn’t stop the developers from making distinct tag databases for each area if that’s a desire from users (or at least make it an option).
When you click on an Area or use keyboard shortcut to an Area, you see the list of all your tasks in Things. In the case of Bear, my thoughts are that in a three pane model (Areas[Tags], Notes and Editor), if you click on an Area, the notes pane is then reduced to just the notes for that Area and the tags would display for that Area below the list of Areas.
Just some thoughts.
To be honest, I do not really know what you imagine so that I could not judge about it. I would have to see it in a mock-up or sketch
I would be perfectly happy if all a “workspace” was was auto-generated tags that are filed separately in the left-hand column so any note created in that “workspace” really just includes that tag, so there is no change at the markdown level, just on the sqlite level of ability to sort in that workspace.
An app called “better things” that sadly isn’t in the app store any ore did folders very well, and you could choose to view your notes with folders or eliminate folders.
I’ll just say for obsidian that while i do use it for all the things i don’t use bear for, that is only because bear doesn’t have workspaces. Bear is faster for syncing and opening and little actions by a small but noticible margin, and i am impatient so the speed of bear makes a difference to me. i want to keep different projects separate which is why i use obsidian for other things; i don’t buy into the whole life in one zettle dogma (reminds me of when NoSQL became a thing but then dealing with weird unstructured mongo databases turned out to be a huge hastle to work with and many of us realises that relational databases with structure are actually not a limitation for 99% of projects).
Whether or not someone wants bear to implement workspaces or not, i simply do not understand why so many people buy this claim that tags solve the problem of differentiating concept spaces more appropriately than work spaces. If i have dozens of tags, i do not want to have to scroll all the way to a particular tag just to sort on that concept; tags are just not the same, they can possibly be the same if you start from day one with a strict structure in mind, but even then it is a hack and arbitrarily cramming a square peg in a round hole to do a basic computing organisational task that has literally been available for 100% of the time that any of us have been using computers.
This wouldn’t solve some of the core problems people want to solve with workspaces. The chief among them being separation from work stuff from private stuff where you might not be allowed to keep both in the same space for legal reasons. It also wouldn’t give you performance advantages from smaller databases.
Yeah, i don’t think any solution will make everyone happy. I know I would be happy with just an way to quickly differentiate and filter by a broad high-level category and then search within that set for notes and tags. A tag actually CAN accomplish this, but it’s not convenient in the current implementation.
I don’t think the niche hypothetical of not allowing work and private stuff in the same space for legal reasons is a general concern; anyone who has that level of legal concern probably isn’t storing that much in bear or on their personal device, anyway.
I doubt workspaces will come anyway, but i’d personally be happy with pretty much any implantation of them. It couldn’t be easier from a programming perspective to add, so it is just a top-level decision for the team and at this point, because bear is better than any other app at doing what it does best, i’m kinda done with requesting this feature and hoping someone agrees with me.
In the short term i know i’ll continue using bear for my current set of quick-access notes; can’t say how things will evolve over a few years