Bear is good, but for using Markdown and publish posts on my blog, I eventually went back to Ulysses. Bear developers should improve that connection. THanks for your clear review of Bear.
Word has shortcuts for formatting. Easy to learn. Bear uses the same shortcuts, even. Word has been around since DOS, and didn't always work with a mouse, so it had keyboard shortcuts before it had wysiwyg buttons.
ThanksThomas. I was really trying to find out if Be a is the thing for me - but I also wanted to say I thought your presentation and clear video were first rate. Lovely production values
I have recently started to dive into the world of markdown. Quite enjoying it. I appreciate you sharing your experience with Bear - but honestly, every plus you seem to make about it is the same thing that Drafts touts as it's strengths. I have also used Editorial and enjoy that app. I am currently using Ulysses on it's two-week trial basis. I would appreciate someone evaluating Bear vs Ulysses vs Drafts vs Editorial vs other markdown options. (One thing I do not understand is ... why doesn't Ulysses support tables with bar punctuations ( | ) ? I am not a novel writer, I rather write technical papers ... I'd love to have my PDFs be able to support tables ! )
The main anxiety that builds up over time interacting with computers is the aversion against solutions that will have dead ends. You never want to be stuck with something you just can't express, and have to throw away information. So I gravitated towards writing Markdown with all the Python Markdown extensions enabled - abbreviations, attribute lists for styling (centering, stuff like that), definition lists, fenced code blocks, footnotes, tables, admonitions, meta-data, table of contents... This relative lack of barriers is what makes Markdown great. When you can't do it in Markdown you can try extensions or raw HTML. I frequently embed RU-vid video fragments when taking notes. I write in Sublime Text with the Markdown Previewer package. (So this is *cross-platform* ) See forum.sublimetext.com/t/what-do-you-guys-use-for-previewing-markdown-these-days-looking-for-an-omnimarkuppreviewer-replacement/36587
Nothing _'ComBears'_ to Scrivener! _[Mac and PC]_ But seriously, Bear looks like a really handy tool but Scrivener is where it is really at for me, way ahead of all of its competitors for both editing, organisation and storing files from images, PDFs and audio and video if you need them for referencing.
Wish they had a feature to reduce the opacity of the H1 markdown language so I can preview what I wrote without all the markup ? I guess the only way to preview without the markdown is to export to view it ?
I have Bear Pro and like it, but cannot follow anything you are talking about (never heard of markdown language and the other stuff you talked about- could not follow any of it). Sounds like you are a programmer or web designer- way more advanced than what I use Bear for! I like Bear for entering ideas on any device, including my Watch and iPad Pro). I like the iPad version best, as it has more features like drawing (use that a lot) and use my Watch and iPhone for dictation. Not sure I will use it for writing (which I do a lot of)- just too used to Word and Pages.
Someone, please, help me understand this fetishization of markdown. I love markdown for one reason: I can easily copy out HTML. Period. Full stop. That's the only real advantage of Markdown. It doesn't make writing faster or anything like that. CMD/ctrl-B (one key press rather than two asterisks) makes the next thing you write bold, and the same keystroke turns it off. Most markdown editors employ the same key combination to automatically add the markdown syntax. Oh--and another objective advantage of Markdown: it's arguably future proof and not platform specific. I can save text files in plain text, but that feature is made obsolete by proprietary database programs like Bear, Ulysses, etc.
Hey, thanks for the video. Like you I have come across from Evernote. Your info was pitched a little over my head unfortunately. Can you recommend a Bear-101 fundamentals type video/information or whatever??? Cheers - Mikel
You can automate the creation of your templates by using callbacks and clicking the link - example bear://x-callback-url/create?text=---%0A%23%20Meeting%3A%20SUBJECT%0A*%20Attendees%3A%20ATTENDEES%0A*%20Date%3A%2013.12.2018%0A---%0A%23%23%20Notes%0A*%20NOTE
There's a UX paradigm struggling to get out here, how do you write fluently but see clearly. Markdown lets you write fluently, incorporating formatting as you go, but ends up an eyesore to look at - you need to preview it to see it clearly. Some designs solve this with *side-by-side previews* (VSCode), others *format in-place without hiding* (Sublime Text 3) and Bear goes with *format in-place with hiding.* Like Luma by Levi Wintering leviwintering.com/luma/ I think what's trying to get out is *a kind of ZUI* (zooming user interface) for writing. People format because they need to chunk information to make it palatable. So modeling this problem we get a kind of fractal layer-cake... From overview to code, from clean and stylish to messy nuts and bolts, from easy to read to precisely specified. Outliner of Giants (RIP) recognized this workflow. You can get something similar using the code folding feature in VS Code.
Hey Thomas, I don't know about everyone else, but I skim videos and don't listen to every second. When I say CLEARLY, I mean in the title or at least in the description. I'm a fan, and hope this helps you with my demographic.
