I am a writer, photographer, publisher and speaker and I have been a Markdown user from the earliest days with apps like iaWriter and faux-Markdown Ulysses. More recently begun to build a personal knowledge vault in Obsidian.

Features I look for are quick and responsive operation, proper Markdown with TOC, jump links and wiki linking/back linking to other notes — and with Panda I have especially welcomed text folding under headings.

I also like to work in a good, clean UI. Bear gives me this, Panda not yet — it needs attention to text size in particular.

Bear deserves a higher place in my preferred usage but it has a drawback in using a non-standard Markdown approach, especially for text emphasis, which causes problems copying into other applications.

I look forward keenly to the new version of Bear which I hope will retain all that is good and introduce PANDA’s improvements.

Something I am using increasingly which developers might like to consider, is speech recognition — dictation and not just typing. The Apple infrastructure is very good for this but needs the stop/start recognition to be smoothed out and better app integration.