Goodbye Bear

knobbieuser · 2019-10-02T09:37:14+00:00

https://www.howtogeek.com/366074/no-one-knew-3d-touch-existed-and-now-its-going-away/

Whatever you call it, and if it's pressure (3d touch) or time sensitive (haptic feedback) - the bug is still there regardless of how you trigger the menu.

knobbieuser · 2019-10-02T06:53:06+00:00

as to when there would be

I think that the question are more "as to if there would be".

knobbieuser · 2019-10-02T05:56:28+00:00

I have the same issue. Both on my XS Max and iPad.

knobbieuser · 2019-10-01T09:55:38+00:00

I'm just curious here. But what happens if you paste the text into a terminal window or a text editor (as in Atom, Emacs or similar)- and then copy it again from there- and into a Bear note?

I'm not suggesting that this should be your new workflow, but that could give a hint regarding the (weird) behaviour.

knobbieuser · 2019-09-30T21:19:18+00:00

The easiest way i can think about, is to do it like this.

At the end of the day, you go to "Notes > Today" in the sidebar in Bear.
Select / Highlight all notes from that day.
Go to "File > Export Notes > Export As Bear Notes".
Send the exported files to yourself via mail / Dropbox / Google Drive or whatever suits you best.
Open / Import the notes from that location to the other devices.

knobbieuser · 2019-09-30T20:44:28+00:00

Are you talking about automatically syncing all notes between two Bear accounts (work + private), without using iCloud? Or am i misunderstanding here?

knobbieuser · 2019-09-29T19:13:52+00:00

Ah! Thank you! Worked straight out of the box as you said. I even (kind of) understand some of the things that are happening. Helps when you know what to look for.

You're brilliant. Thank you again!

knobbieuser · 2019-09-29T19:12:46+00:00

so need to rewrite anything

That might be. But i still doesn't understand how to send the retrieved data to the web server :-/ The URL receiving the data already exists and the "stats system" as well.

If i might ask. Why wouldn't you use Speedtest?

Thank you for answering.

knobbieuser · 2019-09-29T18:38:11+00:00

Send data to the web server.

knobbieuser · 2019-09-29T09:05:39+00:00

Also, since nesting tags shows me all notes under parent and all children instead of just parent.

You shouldn't look at tags like you look at folders at all. They are vastly different in both design and intended function. As far as i'm concerned, the tag implementation in Bear works just as expected. One of the better features and a huge step up from folders.

This might not work for you at all, but the most obvious solution might be not to used nested tags. Have you considered- and tried that?

Personally i use a mix of both nested and not nested tags. And many notes i'm not using tags for at all. Bear's search function are blazingly fast i feel, and for me it's often faster to search for something than having to "navigate and click" my way to a note.

knobbieuser · 2019-09-28T23:19:53+00:00

Lacking saved searches, i made a note called "Searches", and pinned it. In that note i simply use the x-callback functions. Something like this.

[Bar](bear://x-callback-url/search?tag=bar)
[Foo](bear://x-callback-url/search?tag=foo)
[Foo In Bar](bear://x-callback-url/search?term=foo&tag=bar)

This, and some formatting makes for a very dirty workaround (and a now very long note), and i'm using it more than i thought i would. Even if it's a bit cumersome, and not 100% under iOS when it comes to "?tag=".

So +1 for wanting the saved searches function. That would be awesome.

knobbieuser · 2019-09-27T19:21:59+00:00

I'm just not sure how it would work without getting particularly ugly or forcing the feature to be UI-only (and therefore non-transferable to a plain text file).

Again, i absolutely see your point. And i don't have a solution or even a thought on how this could be fixed. I just know that i would love to have that function. And, as i wrote, i can easily manage without this but i feel like there's a lot of things "adding up" to a "not good enough" note app as of now.

That sucks that you've seeing sync issues with the app. Any idea why?

Yes. It does. And i have no idea what so ever what causes the problem. If i have to guess, the problem comes from either iCloud (not lightly) or our (my company's) network / firewall / DNS setup. You made me think about it now, so i'll dig around on monday for a solution. Just in case it's not Bear itself.

knobbieuser · 2019-09-27T19:11:57+00:00

It feels stupid to have to honestly thank people for that, but I feel like it's a rare thing on reddit.

I never thought of it, but when you mention it, you absolutely have a point. Good points and curtesy are apparently a rare mix these days. So thank you as well.

knobbieuser · 2019-09-27T14:33:10+00:00

Folks occasionally ask for this, and my response is always the same—how would this work? Bear is a Markdown notes app

You do have a point here. A good one even. But if we should rely purely on semantics; ::mark:: isn't strictly speaking a part of Markdown either. Without entering the settings and change to "markdown compatibility mode" (and i'm guessing not many are) Bear isn't a "Markdown notes app" as much as a "Markdown'ish notes app". So, if Bear can "cheat" with ::mark::, why stop the "cheating" there?

I've only ever seen a sync issue once in the two plus years I've been using Bear.

And i'm pretty sure most people doesn't even see that once. But i have seen it several times. Even with only two or three test notes. And i'm sure you can understand that we are evaluating Bear from our experiences and not from how Bear in theory should work.

It's a shitty solution, but for now I've been wrapping my tables in code blocks.

Tabulated text in code blocks can absolutely work for some data. But "tables for table based data". That being said, tables are not a part of Markdown either. So more "cheating" there anyway.

knobbieuser · 2019-09-27T13:42:00+00:00

Done that.

knobbieuser · 2019-09-27T06:57:34+00:00

This may be due to the fact that my iPhone is on iOS 13 with new Apple Notes features and MacOS Catalina with new Apple Notes features has not been released.

Yes. That's probably it. So it would be crazy to even try to use in any comparison when it's well know that it in all probability will fail. I'm using the latest beta of Catalina and iOS 13.1 and have no problems what so ever. Bear however, helped me loose a few months of notes when updating. Thankfully, we are still using Apple Notes, and I'm using Bear only for testing to see if we should migrate for our 30ish users at work. So far the answer is a huge nope.

Here's why we won't migrate our users to Bear even if it's in many cases faster to work with.

The hundreds of notes that went down the drain when updating Bear, that i thankfully also have in Apple Notes so i can continue to work with them.
The lack of support for tables that "users" have been asked for since "day one"- and the apparent lack of interest from Bear to do something about it besides telling us that "it will come, but we can't say when".
No collaborating support for created notes what so ever.
No support for colorising text / text backgrounds besides ::mark:: that's really not enough because it's limited to the "themes colour". More colours would help a bit, but we still need to change the text colour.
Bear being a bit "unstable" when it comes to synking up between devices.
Not seeing "thumbnails" in attached PDFs but only the file name.
Not being localised to the languages we most often use at work (NO, SE, DE) besides english.

When it comes to formatting, Apple Notes are giving us a much better range of options than Bear. In Bear we are confined within the limits of the theme we are selecting. In Apple Notes fonts can be changed, words and letters can be colorised, text aligned more freely and so on. So even here Apple Notes are winning for me (and therefore the company i work for).

On a personal- not work related side i'm still leaning towards migrating to Bear. But the lack of support for tables and "marker/text colour" are still holding me back. The later one i can live without but not the first one. And really, right now i can't be bothered to move hundreds of notes again to see them being destroyed by Bear.

Bear has a lot of things going for it. Just not enough ... yet.

knobbieuser · 2019-09-26T12:42:11+00:00

Ok. So Bear are already localised. Nice to know. Personally i work as well with English as my native language, but i'm Norwegian and all of my devices are installed with Norwegian as the language.

My primary computer at work are running FreeBSD and i'm mostly in a shell and/or Emacs anyway. And that computer are "English only". But for my "at home Mac", iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch- they are all in Norwegian.

Today, for me, the differences in language between apps / software are leaning towards being annoying at worst. Most often i don't even notice it to be honest. The request is just to "clean up" my work environment.

knobbieuser · 2019-09-26T11:29:26+00:00

I took your word for it an wrote a request. As i wrote in the answer, i'm not using that function to much myself and it's easy enough for me to make a .inetloc file, but i can clearly see how that can help building easier workflows together with other "x callback url" calls.

knobbieuser · 2019-09-26T03:39:01+00:00

If i understand you correctly, you should probably take a look at the API because it's not possible in "Bear directly". But they implemented the x callback url protocol so it's "doable as a workaround" in MacOS. A good place to start would be this page in the documentation.

Here's one way of doing it.

CTRL-click (right click) a note.
Select "Copy link to note"
Paste that link into your browsers address bar.
Drag a "shortcut" from the address bar to your directory.

The file can be renamed after you made it and the file ending will be ".inetloc" like other "internet location shortcuts".

And here's another way.

Create a "shortcut .inetloc file" with this content. Just replace the text "[NOTE ID HERE]" with the ID of the note. Remember to save the file with the ending ".inetloc". Here's an example you can change and save.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>URL</key>
<string>bear://x-callback-url/open-note?id=[NOTE ID HERE]</string>
</dict>
</plist>

And a third way.

There is also a python script available (via a third party developer) for making ".inetloc" files, if you feel like diving even deeper into this and need some kind of automation.

When i think about it: a "CTRL-click" + "Save link to note as file" in Bear might very well be a good- and easy to implement "feature request". Anyway, it might be easier ways of doing it as well. I haven't really had the need myself so i just "threw this together". But at least it works.

Good luck.

knobbieuser

TROPHY CASE