I just installed Joplin on my mac and I have a question about the UI. in View mode the notes are not editable, however the format/edit bar is present and if you highlight some text you can format it with by clicking on something in the the edit/format bar. This is very confusing to me, I would expect that the bar only be present in edit mode so the text can not be accidentally changed. Did miss something?
No, you cannot format selected text in view mode.
However, you can click on icons in the toolbar and the result will be inserted into the text at the last cursor position when switching to view mode.
e.g. if you selected a text and clicked B for bold, the text would not be changed to bold, but strong text would be inserted at the cursor position.
IMO this is a bug. The toolbar should be inactive in view mode.
Yes you are correct what what you described is exactly what I am seeing and I agree I would call this a bug too.