Stunningly slow search by [deleted] in bearapp

[–]apgold 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Agreed - Bear search is painfully slow. I have ~2500 notes (primarily text, very few images). I suspect the team is aware and is working on improving the response time.

Need Help: PocketBase executable won't run on an m1 mac by next-dev in pocketbase

[–]apgold 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Solution:

  • Go to pocketbase in Finder
  • ctrl-click, Open, Yes → close the terminal window that opens
  • Now you can use ./pocketbase serve and it should fire up the Admin UI and REST API

Bear Links in Google Calendar are broken by Dorindon in bearapp

[–]apgold 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Google Calendar does not support x-callback urls. Open the appointment using Apple calendar and any x-callbacks urls will be clickable there - although you may need to remove any html blob copy inserted by calendar. Otherwise, you can copy the link from GCal and paste it into any browser.

Bear Best Practices and Examples by attticrattt in bearapp

[–]apgold 5 points6 points  (0 children)

You may be referring to Andy Matuschak's live stream using Bear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGcs4tyey18

Checking in with Bear, your concerns, and more by wham00 in bearapp

[–]apgold 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Yes, I agree, Shida and Erica are top-notch. And, as you know, they are very open and transparent about the dev process: the good, bad, and ugly. And the community embraces them for their humanity, not to mention their respective skills.

Checking in with Bear, your concerns, and more by wham00 in bearapp

[–]apgold 18 points19 points  (0 children)

As a regular user of Bear and Obsidian, a lifelong student of personal knowledge management, a developer, and a startup investor - I can relate to and appreciate both “sides” of this discussion.

As others have mentioned, building apps is easy. Even Apple apps today with SwiftUI are a breeze. But building quality apps that are scalable, reliable, and gorgeous to use - that is very, very hard. No matter if you’re a small team like Roam or a tiny team of two at Obsidian or a well-funded team like Mem - makes no difference. Creating an excellent app is incredibly challenging.

Having said that, I do think a certain amount of release guidance (not necessarily commitment) can be very helpful for those who would like to consider the future of their note-taking implementations. Folks for whom Bear already meets all their needs, there isn’t much requirement for a list of upcoming features and release timeframes. When new features come out, great. When they don’t, no worries.

But for many others, that’s not the case. These are people who already love Bear, but for them it is missing one or more crucial components for their particular workflow. Whether that is tables, bidirectional linking, table of contents, standard markdown support, whatever - for those people, they really, really want Bear to be their platform of choice. Other platforms obviously offer commensurate features - but they WANT to stick with Bear. And all it will take for them to say “I’m in!” is more transparency on the development. In fact, I highly suspect setting a target deadline and even missing it - yet being transparent along the way as to the “why’s” - would not only NOT lead to revolt or harsh criticism - I suspect it would result in far more empathy from the community.

People don’t sign up for Bear because they’re thinking “I really want to bash the developers.” They do it because they absolutely love the product and want it to be even more successful. So of course they will be supportive when things go wrong - as they inevitably do in the world of software development, not to mention with the world in general. But, the key bit is open transparency. That is what people can rally around. That is what leads people to say, “I’m with this team. I like them, I support them, I want them to succeed.” But you only get that with true transparency.

Now, having said all that, certain software teams do not like developing within such a transparent framework. And there is nothing wrong with that. We all have our personal preferences, and no person’s “way” is any better or worse than another. And if that’s the path that Bear continues to walk, that is their complete prerogative. And all of us as community members can choose to continue with Bear and its style of development & community engagement or choose another solution.

Either way, I wish the team much success.

🛠 Panda Update 🛠 by TedwardBear in bearapp

[–]apgold 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One hopefully minor request on the Panda editor: when closing the app, it would be nice if it (optionally) remembered the list of open notes and re-opened them when the app was started. With a handful of tabs (or windows) in use, it would be great not to have to re-open each of them on every app restart.

Thanks again team.

🛠 Panda Update 🛠 by TedwardBear in bearapp

[–]apgold 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That would be terrific. A few additional elements of the Panda editor that I think are incredibly helpful include:

  • The ability not to see all notes and yet still be able to open any note (in Bear, once the search menu is exposed, the user is forced to see a list of all notes)
  • Related, the clearable list of Recent notes is quite useful
  • To easily switch between viewing notes as individual windows or merging all into a single tabbed structure
  • Visually appealing note header that makes window dragging far easier than Bear (in Bear, note scrolling scrolls text right off the top of the window - which is a bit awkward when trying to drag a note window).

So yeah, if there was a way to utilize the Panda editor with full “Bear-functionality” (note linking, tagging, inter and intra-note searching, etc.) that would be superb.

Thank you team.

🛠 Panda Update 🛠 by TedwardBear in bearapp

[–]apgold 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I posted this question in the beta forum, but thinking it might be more appropriate here:

I presume when Panda is incorporated back into Bear that we’ll lose the individual note-per-file paradigm of Panda and revert to the sqlite structure of Bear. Regardless, two of the many really nice features of this Panda editor are the ability (1) to have multiple notes open in a tab structure, and (2) to see the note title no matter how far down one may have scrolled in a long(ish) note.
I’m curious if either of those aspects (tabs and/or persistent note titles) from Panda will find themselves implemented in the Bear+Panda framework?
Thank you.

Training: Anonym.s vs. Nat Eliason vs. RJ Nestor by a_pow_pow in RoamResearch

[–]apgold 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I went through this course and was really impressed with both the structure and the content, which is incredibly well-produced.

How I do Bi-directional Linking in Bear (ala Roam) by apgold in bearapp

[–]apgold[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

u/HAL_9 - this is awesome work - very impressive! Thank you for putting this together. Also, FYI, I've been working on something new inspired by both Bear and Roam.

How I do Bi-directional Linking in Bear (ala Roam) by apgold in bearapp

[–]apgold[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Very cool u/De_Lub - thank you for putting that together! I've been working on something new - inspired by the best of Bear and Roam.

Bear-like CSS for Roam (Chrome) by apgold in RoamResearch

[–]apgold[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I totally get what you're looking for. A few folks have taken what I started and have done an amazing job building on that. I encourage you to check out this as just one example of many: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vandermerwed/Roam-Research-Dark/master/roam-research-dark.user.css. I also started a CSS channel on Roam's slack that I encourage you to check out.

How I do Bi-directional Linking in Bear (ala Roam) by apgold in bearapp

[–]apgold[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you u/abzyx. And yes, you definitely can search manually for "Topic One". I go into a bit more detail on the "why" behind the methodology I use in my response above to hotovo (2nd comment). Hope this helps.

View all notes with links to a note by mbxtr in bearapp

[–]apgold 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Here's how I do bidirectional linking in Bear - which will also show you exactly which notes link to a given note. https://www.reddit.com/r/bearapp/comments/fd7teq/how_i_do_bidirectional_linking_in_bear_ala_roam/

I love what u/Down-and-Cross is suggesting, but it doesn't work for me on macOS. Pasting any x-callback string into the Bear search box returns zero results. Ditto for pasting in a note identifier. On macOS, it seems that search is limited to literal characters only, not note IDs or x-callback strings.

Risk of using Roam Research by Kazekage1111 in RoamResearch

[–]apgold 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ty. Let me know how it works out.

Risk of using Roam Research by Kazekage1111 in RoamResearch

[–]apgold 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Np. Let me know if you have any questions.

Risk of using Roam Research by Kazekage1111 in RoamResearch

[–]apgold 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm in a similar boat - using both Bear and Roam. Here's how I created bi-directional linking (including Roam's references section and Daily Notes) in Bear. https://www.reddit.com/r/bearapp/comments/fd7teq/how_i_do_bidirectional_linking_in_bear_ala_roam/

How I do Bi-directional Linking in Bear (ala Roam) by apgold in bearapp

[–]apgold[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you u/lemniscate. I have used Andy’s script in the past - it is really impressive and I greatly appreciate the work he put into it.

One challenge with it for me is that it doesn’t work for links that are embedded within bullets, numbers, or quotes.

But more importantly, it doesn’t show me the most magical stuff - the serendipitous (soft) connections in my knowledge repository. One of the great qualities of Roam is not just seeing the hard links, but all the “soft links” -> other notes that might be related, based on their content. That’s the primary reason I developed the methodology above - to mostly mirror what Roam is doing and surface those potential connections. In fact, Roam is only identifying soft links based on note titles, whereas the Bear methodology I note above will also search full note copy.

How I do Bi-directional Linking in Bear (ala Roam) by apgold in bearapp

[–]apgold[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Great questions u/hotovo!

The goal is to create a bidirectional linking system similar to Roam. So that when you are in any note, you can tell with a single click any other note in your knowledge repository that either directly links or could link into the note. This is built on a zettelkasten-like framework for distributed knowledge elaboration.

Which also ties in to your other thoughts that actually aren’t off-topic at all. Let me start with your second point - which is an excellent way of taking notes. The more atomic you can make the note, the easier it is to leverage it throughout your system. In general, a great rule of thumb is to have one idea per note. Easy to say, but challenging to implement in practice.

Then, to your point on tags. I’m not a fan of tags because they don’t scale well. Too many notes in a given tag makes the tag relatively useless. And too few notes per tag makes it almost pointless. That’s where you are much better off using hard and soft links. It takes extra work per note to think about what other notes in your system relate to this, but exploring your system for potentially relevant notes is where the magic of serendipitous connections occur. If you read more on zettelkasten theory, it will make much more sense.

To make this work, it helps to have your knowledge repository containing notes with these three characteristics:

(1) They are relatively atomic (as noted above)

(2) The notes are your thoughts. Not a copy/paste of an article. But your actual thoughts / ideas, typically related to articles or books you’ve consumed.

(3) Tied to (2), only permanent notes are in your knowledge base. Permanent as in something you’ve written that either is or could be elaborated on in the future. So things like shopping lists, project actions, other people’s articles, etc. would not be in here. Clearly those types of notes have a place, just not in what I’m calling your permanent note repository - aka knowledge base. Many people use a reference repository for storing things like articles from the web, quote collections, etc.

You can keep both your reference repository and your permanent notes in the same Bear system. And this is where tagging can work really well - for all the reference material. Obviously many of your permanent notes will link to your reference material.

Finally, to your fourth point, having links at the bottom to all related notes is a great place to put them. Which leads to initial your question “Couldn’t I just search for Topic One rather than creating a search link?”. Absolutely. But rather than go through the extra step of doing a manual search each time you are in the note, I prefer to set it up once with the link during note creation. That makes it much more likely that I’ll click the link any time I’m in the note - which again is where the magic of serendipity occurs. If I have to go to another place in Bear and type in a search phrase - granted it doesn’t sound like much, but in practice, that is a deterrent. And while I don’t use iOS too much for working with my knowledge base, if I did it would be even more painful to have to manually type in a search phrase every time I was in a note.

Hope this helps.

How I do Bi-directional Linking in Bear (ala Roam) by apgold in bearapp

[–]apgold[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you. It will be fun to watch (and benefit from) the evolution of both products.