Bear still is one of my favorite apps. Easily one of the best tools you can use if you write in Markdown.

Last year their team finally released Bear 2, and we’re now at v2.8 ¹

But of course, designing apps for a living, and working with it on a daily basis, I have my list of improvements I’d like to see. Some of these I mentioned before, but here’s an updated list:

• Differentiate non-existing wikilinks
• Add +++ for page breaking
• Allow to create aliases
• Add more options for checklists
• Include a linter
• Add smart folders (or saved searches)
• Improve the Archive feature

I know the team over at Shiny Frog is always concerned about over-complicating Bear (and I love this approach), but I think most of these can be added without much fuss.

A few words about each of these…

The first four are, I think, pretty easy to introduce:

Differentiate non-existing wikilinks

In Bear, there’s no way to see if a wikilink actually points to a note or not. Both looks the same (red text, no decoration) whether the note exists or doesn’t.

I keep clicking on links thinking they’ll open a note, but instead I create an empty one by mistake.

Obsidian, for example, does this simply: non-existing links have lower opacity. That’s it.

Add +++ for page breaks

When exporting to PDF or printing, Bear has no way to control where pages break. A heading or the first line of a paragraph can end up stranded at the bottom of a page, separated from the rest of the section. A simple +++ on its own line would fix this.

This is not standard markdown, but the Bear team has already broken this rule when they introduced different colours for highlights, as the markdown renders to ==🟣Highlight==.

Allow to create aliases

Aliases are useful to reference files using a different name. One example could be to give the alias Design System to the plurarly named Design Systems note. Another one could be to be able to reference Steve Wozniak also using [[Woz]], without having to type [[Steve Wozniak|Woz]].

Since Bear has recently introduced YAML, this could be a great little feature to implement:

---
aliases: Woz
---

# Steve Wozniak

Add more options for checklists

As previously mentioned, allow users to cancel tasks using [-] and mark them in progress using [/]. I think this is enough, without having to go all the way in as some Obsidian themes do.

With the next three points we enter more into a dream-like scenario, and I know they require quite some work to get them right:

Include a linter

I’m pretty obsessed about writing “good markdown”, keeping only one line between paragraphs, list items, titles, writing lists using - instead of *, and other small (maniacal) obsessions.

I think that it would fit with Bear’s mission to help users create beautiful 💫 files.

Of course, to keep Bear’s spirit intact, this option should be minimal, maybe even a simple toggle without allowing the users to change how the linting works.

And to start with, it could be an option available only in Bear CLI.

Add smart folders (or saved searches)

Lots of searches have to be done manually, and you have to remember this list of queries.

The solution most people use is to save these in a Bear note, or run them using Apple Shortcuts.

What almost every other app does, instead, is to allow users to save these in the sidebar. Even iA Writer, the most minimalistic markdown editor out there, has had this feature for a long time!

Improve the Archive feature

I don’t think the archive feature has received any update since it was introduced and it’s, honestly, pretty useless.

The main issue is that, when you move a note to the Archive, you no longer see its tags in the sidebar. Sure, you can still search in the Archive, but any possibility of visual navigation is gone.

It’s worth saying that, even if these features will not get implemented, I’ll keep using Bear. It’s cheap, beautifully made, and the team clearly knows what they want.