Bear's Lettera beta app has a fixed table of contents sidebar. Please please please bring this to Bear! The current floating TOC sidebar get's the job done, but Lettera's fixed TOC is so much cleaner. 🤞🤞🤞

P.S. I know you can "tear" the sidebar off now, but I still think Lettera's approach is a million times better.

I made a custom dark theme for Bear called Bear Red Dark.

Is there a way to use the font in Bear (BearSansUi-Regular) in other applications? I find it very easy to read and enjoy how it looks on the screen.

Thanks!

I've been switching a lot between Obsidian, Bear and even Lettera but I keep fiddling with stuff instead of writing. What do I want to write? I am an acupuncturist and manual therapist, working for 27 years and do life long learning (as everybody should). A lot of knowledge is in mij head, but sometimes it's nice to quickly look things up, that's where my own knowledge base comes in. I want to fill this with all the stuff that's in my head, linking it together, etc. I don't care for the graph view, I think it's gimmicky, but I do care about looks. I'm completely in the Apple ecosystem, but I don't know if that will be forever, so markdown is important for portability.

what keeps me switching around? Mainly the editor from Bear, it's so much cleaner and better to read for me (I'm colorblind so the better contrast and brighter highlights in Bear help), Obsidian feels less pretty. Yes I know I can turn Obsidian into anything I want but, my ADD-light throws me in these rabbit holes of tinkering to make it look a certain way. So to protect myself I only use Obsidian in vanilla mode.

Obsidian feels like a more serious tool because of all the extra options and the online buzz that it's for academics and researchers, Bear feels a little cartoonish with the Bear cartoon popping up here and there.

I don't know what to do now and I'm sure others have had these problems as well. Tips?

Is there a reason why the text for the BIU / ABC button is microscopic, in the latest iOS Bear? It strains one’s eyes and is out of step with the rest of the UI. Accessibility, anyone?

Hi guys,

Is it possible to clear/delete completed items in checklists?

Thanks

Hi there!

Is there a way to search for notes that only have #tag and no other tag.

Eg:

Note 1: #tag #tag2

Note 2: #tag

Note 3: no tag

Is there a way to make the search to only return Note 2 (because it's the only note that has #tag only)?

Collaboration.. If Bear just released a duplicate version of Bear, as a separate app (let’s call it ‘Bear +2’ or ‘Bear Families’), with a separate payment, then spouses/families could log-in with a shared email address for the Bear +2 account, allowing shared notes between family members.

Absolutely love Bear, but the lack of collaboration is a right Pain In The A** though. :). Having to use (and pay different developers) for a different system just to collaborate with my spouse seems pointless. More than happy to pay again for ‘Bear +2’, for the ability to work on stuff with my spouse via a second distinct Bear +2 app.

What am I missing here, why isn’t it this simple?

Bear just duplicates the app, all development is identical, Devs publish it as Bear +2, we pay the devs more money.

Bear for MY life / work. Bear +2 for Family life/ collaborating with spouse (family). Spouse has own Bear sub for spouses life.
I would pay 2x subscriptions to the devs vs just 1 at present. Seems like a win-win. Between us we’d pay for 3 subs vs just 2.

Everything stays aligned.. (maybe just change the logo to 2+ bears vs 1 bear). User base is clearly told development is identical to Bear, there won’t ever be different development for Bear+2, no allocating tasks to individuals, no team-member nonsense, just bear notes, bear tags, bear search….but in an app called Bear +2.

- Syncing obviously the main orange flag issue here, but any conflict in notes = a duplicate note is created and it’s up to the Bear +2 members to clean up any duplicates.

FYI: I used AI to summarize my question since English is not my mother tongue and I had a hard time to describe the issue.

I have around 2,000 notes in Bear and organize them using tags for different areas of my life, such as #Health, #Work, #Family, and #Finance.

My workflow is to go through my All Notes list and assign the appropriate life-area tags as I review each note.

The problem is simple: When browsing All Notes, I can’t easily tell whether a note has already been assigned to a particular life area.

For example, I come across a note about a doctor’s appointment. I want to assign it to #Health, but I don’t know whether it already has that tag.
I have two options:

- Open the note and inspect its existing tags. Or
- Drag the note onto the #Health tag again, just to be safe.

Both options add friction, especially when doing this across thousands of notes.

I could search for notes that don’t have #Health ("-#Health"), but then I would have to repeat the process separately for every life area.

How do you handle this when working through a large All Notes list in Bear? Is there a more efficient workflow for reviewing notes and assigning the appropriate tags without constantly opening notes to check whether a tag is already assigned?
I’m not necessarily looking for a UI customization. I’m more interested in how other Bear users approach this problem in practice.

Has anyone else experienced repeated crashes of Bear when using (Apple's own) dictation in Golden Gate (27.0.1)?

Is happening every time, and sometimes only after one or two sentences. Bear locks up, stays that way, and I have to force quit, after which I lose some of the dictated text.

Dictation doesn't crash other apps, and the text appears much quicker on screen in (e.g.) Mail than in Bear, where there can be delays between speech and seeing text, before a crash happens.

This is the second time I've had to figure this out. I don't remember having checked that box to make Bear's Command - N shortcut a system wide shortcut in other apps and browsers, but it was checked again (was it set as default in an update?). So for awhile I was wondering WTF is going on. Then by searching I figured out that I had already fixed this once 3-4 years ago, which I did not remember.

Bear Settings > General > 'Create New Note' should be off by default, and it should be labeled as a Global Shortcut. As it stands, it appears that you need to check it to have a New Note shortcut in Bear. You do not. If you check that box it becomes a Global Shortcut, and Bear will come to the front and create a new note regardless of what app you're in.

Can we please get a proper label and explanation added, and if it resets to ON by default in updates, it should not.

Global Shortcut in Bear Settings

Hi everyone! Can someone explain me the mindset behind pinned notes within "All notes" compared to pinned notes within a tag?

When I pin a note within a tag, it is only pinned within that tag. When I pin it within "All notes" it is only pinned within the All Notes-View but not within the specific tag view.

When I open a All Notes-pinned note via the All Notes-view I can unpin it in the notes settings. When I open that same All Notes-pinned note via the Tag-View, I can not unpin the note in the notes settings.

Technically it is correct, but for my brain in practice it doesn't make sense.

Therefore I don't use the pin feature at all even though it could be very useful. I simply cannot grasp the concept or use case.

Maybe a change in mindset or the perspective or the way of thinking about pinning notes can make them useful for me.

Thank you in advance 🙏

I wanted to test the connector for Claude and got this warning.

Why the extreme permissions. Surely you only need access to bear related stuff

Installing will grant this extension access to everything on your computer. Any developer information shown has not been verified by Anthropic. Ensure you trust the source of this extension before installation.

i have seen so many videos in yt about the deep integration of bear notes with apple ecosystem and i tried it and it was really useful but still when i say "Siri add this thing to my notes (with screen aware context)" it saved in apple notes instead of my bear notes. so i checked online forums but didnt find any solution

the solution:

then i went to settings inside siri ai and found that toggling off "Learn from this app" of stock apple notes the siri ai is defaulting all the new notes to the bear app!!

I switched from Apple Notes (AN) to Bear for two reasons:

1. The bugs in AN were driving me crazy.
   
2. I like the writing experience in Bear.

Since I’ve been using AN for several years, I’ve tried to make Bear feel as close to AN as possible by customizing the theme and typography settings. But then I realized that Bear doesn’t have a Gallery View.

On Mac, I actually wouldn’t mind the List View itself if it weren’t for one thing: Bear automatically displays the most recent note in the editor pane on the right. Sometimes I just want to browse my notes without having a note open all the time.

So, this is my feature request: I’d love to see an option to switch between List View and Gallery View. Alternatively, it would be great to have an option to hide the editor pane until I select a note.

6 months of notes filled with essays, essay plans, analysis, perfectionism and of all nighters and blood sweat and tears for my English A level, gone. I didn’t delete it, and yet when I woke up everything else was there but this note, my lifeline, I have searched all inbox and folders for 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😭💔 I’m cooked and in denial

EDIT: Thanks all, I knew it couldn’t be true!! That one note just had not sync-ed/ somehow self deleted to my phone and computer, and neither did the backups i made make it. All is well, thank goodness, as my iPad which i primarily use bear on, has everything and i have now made a bajillion copies. Happy ending <3

Hi guys,

Is it possible to have a function to clear completed items within a checklist/to-do list, when the user presses a specific button? Something like Google Keep.

As a workaround, is it possible to do this via the Shortcuts app?

Thanks

Seems to be a fairly recent thing. I'm on Bear 3.0.1 and macOS 27.0.1.

P.S. I doublechecked that "fullwidth" is a correct spelling.
P.P.S. I doublechecked that "doublechecked" is a correct spelling.

are there anyways to get it back? i only have this one note in my todo page and it just disappeared like that. i have bear pro, my notes are all synced, but it's just this page that goes missing the next day. ive tried uninstalling the app as well but it still remains this way. i checked the trash and it's not there as well

Is there a way to make all notes open in Read Only mode by default? I know I can select notes n make them read only but it would be easier to have a setting for this.

Thanks !

I have been on the beta but today was the first day where instead of showing apple notes as the app pointed to for the quick actions below texts it showed bear! Thought it was cool, anyone else seeing this?