Testing it out now (macOS). The following is just a somewhat random list of thoughts as I check out how it works... will be very boring if you have no interest in Bear 2...
Very nice upgrade from v1, which I checked out last year when looking for an evernote replacement. v1 was way too limited
for me with no WYSIWYG formatting
(throughout this comment, I understand that what I think is sucky, someone else may think is great).
I like the
look of Bear - it just has that look of a native Mac app. It's elegant. However, overboard on the white space. I don't care for "crowded", but it's ridiculous how much space they're wasting. There's a mile-wide margin between the side list of notes, and the note text.
One thing I love about Joplin is you can adjust the scale of the note text without changing font size. Great for small screens. I'd really miss that on Bear.
Bear uses tags to organize. Though tags can be useful, I was concerned they were no replacement for folders. But Bear organizes notes by tags, creating tag "folders" and "sub folders" by using tags. Very cool. So you can organize the same note into multiple tag "folders". Very useful for me where I can never remember what folder a "shopping list" is under in a traditional folder system. Now I could store it in multiple places using multiple tags. At the same time, this could make
reorganizing a lot of notes a major PITA. Instead of just dragging a bunch of notes to a different folder, I'm not sure if there's a way to do the same in Bear. You can do a find & replace in an individual note, but I don't see anyway to quickly replace tags in multiple notes in one go. Am I missing something?
They're still going the weird route with unnecessary formatting effects, e.g. when you
bold a word, it does a little animation. All the text moves around for a moment during the animation. Completely unnecessary and annoying. I'm bolding text, I don't need a celebration.
There still appears to be silly limitations to formatting, like a lime-green-only highlighter. If you're not going to offer unlimited colors, how about at least four colors? Would that really ruin the "light text editor" vibe? Tables are extremely limited and difficult to work with.
The formatting toolbar, which you have to turn on if you want it visible, floats at the bottom of the screen. I hate that for a Mac app. I suppose they think it's convenient if you're on an iphone, and they want to keep it consistent, but for a developer that hates toolbars, why did they think it was so important to put it right where your thumb might accidentally hit it while one-hand scrolling. This is typical developer thinking they're being smart when they're actually being stupid.
So, as someone who settled on Joplin a year ago, do I switch? Joplin was the best I could find for
my needs, and I tested just about every single note app mentioned in this thread. But Joplin was more of a "least bad" than a "this is great" app. It's UI is sucky, just not as sucky as all the others. It has stupid limitations like having to command-click on links. It's hard to get away from the markdown underpinnings of Joplin. It has all sorts of odd formatting glitches. I think I've said it before here, but what is so hard about simply cloning the Evernote UI? It was popular for a reason, it's primary problems were that the developers trashed the performance of the app, added features no one wanted while not improving on the ones users cared about, and jacked the price up to crazy-land.
I'll have to see how my notes import into Bear v2, and performance when handling hundreds of notes. Without testing every export/import option, anyone have suggestions on best options to choose for exporting from Joplin and importing into Bear? I have lots of formatting, web links, embedded pictures, etc.
