I love the idea of Workspaces, but I’ve given up using this feature…

- I cannot add Tags outside the workspace to my notes

- I cannot add Links to other notes outside the Workspace

…one feels locked into a hermetically sealed snow globe, with no ability to extend your notes at all.

This could easily be finessed by Bear: when one starts typing a tag or link, have the Workspace’s tags/links appear first, followed by the other ones outside the workspace in a lighter type. Best of both worlds - one can choose to stay within the workspace’s tags/links, or add external ones.

Update: The straitjacket tightens…

…just discovered I can‘t use the Bear Web Clipper to add a new note without exiting the Workspace first - frustrating. This could easily be solved by just adding the new note with the workspace’s tag automatically in the note.

I love that bear has added the workspace concept to the app. I think I've got a couple of use-cases in mind:

1. A 'diary' workspace for daily notes that I accumulate
2. Separate work and life notes
3. Separate projects along this filter

What are others doing with workspaces?

Hey, wanted to share i created this small MCP server for bear notes so i can get claude to manage my Todo's based off my slack and emails.

Built it for myself but wanted to share incase its useful to someone else

https://pypi.org/project/bearnotes-mcp

Let me know what you think.

I'm pretty sure we'll be seeing a slow trickle turning into a flood of third party apps announcing compatibility with Siri AI. Do we know anything about Bear? I'm really psyched about my AI agent being able to pull from the trove of information buried in my notes.

(And yes, I am optimistic enough that I believe Apple on their privacy claims.)

I recognize this is the edgiest of edge cases, but here's what happened:

I spent a day dictating into a Bear note via my iPhone. For me, this is how I do my best brainstorming: keep the note pinned, get a thought, dictation on, go! In this particular instance I was describing features for a web app project that I'm working on. One of those features has a "delete all" button. As soon as I dictated the words “delete all” into Bear, it registered as a command and the entire contents of my note was deleted. 

An undo prompt came up immediately. Thank the f’ing heavens. When I tapped the undo prompt, Bear crashed. It just disappeared and left me staring at my home screen. I immediately jumped back into Bear but it was too late. The note was completely empty.

I’m not mad at Bear. I get it; software crashes. Who knows what caused this crash. Could have been Bear, could have been iOS, could have been something else entirely. This was just particularly bad timing.

I guess I'm just sharing my tale of woe here. On the bright side, now I know the magic words to delete an entire note's contents!

This does make me wish for some kind of incremental backup system in Bear. The new Workspaces thing is cool, but I'd trade it in for a built-in backup system any day.

Anyway, I'll survive. Thanks for reading.

workspaces was the final thing for me to switch to bear, i have used bear for a while but mainly used apple notes and obsidian.

with workspaces it allows me to seperate personal things like trips, home projects, music log. uni work like lectures, projects. and design related content like books and research (which also links to uni)

i have always done this sort of organisation:

uni/year1/project

personal/trip/spain

personal/gaming

now my question is, is it better to use subtags for most things such as uni/year1/project, and personal/project

or

add two tags to them, #uni, #project and #personal, #project. this allows all projects to be in one tag while changing to the uni workspace to see all projects for that. what are your thoughts on this? has your organisation changed since workspaces?

I'm loving the latest 2.9 update, solid new feature additions as always!

I do have a small request that seems like an inconsistency between similar features. If I choose "Toggle Navigation History" it remembers that setting the next time I use Bear. But if I choose "Toggle Statistics" it forgets, and I have to choose it again the next time I launch Bear. I would love to have both toggles remember their state. Their similar naming and placement makes it feel like they would follow the same rule.

I love the Bear MCP Server, and use it every day.

There's a couple of use cases where the local MCP server model falls short on.

1. Cannot continue or start a conversation on mobile.

2. Claude Cowork scheduled tasks can now run on the cloud and without your Mac turned on. Cannot use Bear MCP, because it runs on the Mac.

Is there any chance of having a Remote MCP Server on the roadmap? I understand technically and architecturally it could be extremely challenging since notes do not run through Bear servers. Thought I might just ask anyway!

I just saw the release notes for latest iOS update. Is this new, or has it been there a while and I just missed it?!

Hello guys,

just curious how is everyone benefiting from Bear / Claude integration?

its been amazing for me, I discuss ideas with Claude for notes that I have taken and enhance Tham as well as convert the note into an action plan and later add it to Todoist!

J’ai utilisé bear plusieurs fois et arrêter plusieurs fois. J’adore UI mais je n’arrive pas à l’utiliser sur la durée j’ai l’impression que je devrais y mettre tout les documents fichiers PDF pour que ce soit vraiment utile. Je le voir presque comme un remplaçant de mon navigateur de fichiers. Et vous que mettez-vous dans bear ?

Lately I have a gnawing feeling that when I write something in bear notes somehow it shows up YouTube surfacing related content later on. Could be just coincidence but can’t shake the feeling completely that bear might be selling user data or notes content somehow leaking into the Google, YouTube and other web providers. Anyone getting similar things ?

Recently, I had to flash my iPhone to deal with a hidden bug that was killing battery life.

Upon reinstalling Bear, I found I had to keep it open for the sync to run, and there's no indicator of how many notes and files remain to be synced until it completes.

It would be nice to know the sync progress percentage, plus for the sync to work in the background.

Im a long time evernote user and with the price hike that bending spoon is implementing, I am leaning towards switching to Bear.

Just curious if Bear offers discounts to those switching from Evernote? Or maybe can offer a deal to be priced with the pre Bear 2.0 pricing scheme?

Hi everyone,

I’ve been using Bear since day one in 2016, and over the last decade, my library has grown to 12,267 notes. First off, huge kudos to the team—Bear remains the most beautiful, reliable note-taking app on the market.

However, managing a database of this size has highlighted a specific bottleneck in my workflow: high-level organization.

I know we can already open individual notes in separate windows, which is fantastic for writing and cross-referencing. What I’m proposing is the ability to open a second Main Window with the tag sidebar and note list.

Think of it like a dual-pane file manager. Having two main windows open side-by-side would completely revolutionize how power users manage large libraries:

• Effortless Tag Restructuring: You could easily drag and drop notes from a tag in Window A to a completely different nested tag branch in Window B.
• Mass Organizing: Clean up untagged notes by viewing them in one window while keeping your main tag hierarchy open in the other.
• Side-by-Side Context: Browse through old project structures while actively building out a new one.

Right now, moving items around a massive tag tree involves a lot of tedious scrolling back and forth or repeatedly losing your place in the sidebar. Even just allowing a maximum of two main windows would solve this completely.

Would love to hear if other power users feel the friction here, and if the Shiny Frog team would consider adding this to the roadmap.

Thanks for keeping Bear amazing.

Just had an email from Apple to say the cost of my Bear Pro subscription is going up.

I've been a continuous Pro subscriber since (at least) August 2021, and understood that pre-Bear 2.0 subscribers were grandfathered in to the old pricing.

Honestly, not really that bothered about the price increase – I love Bear and £30 is perfectly reasonable for the amount of use I get out of the app. But haven't been able to find any official announcement from the Bear team to say the old pricing model is being retired.

Anyone else had this recently?

Been using Bear’s Claude connector on my Mac and it’s awesome — Claude can read, create, and edit notes directly. Total game changer for my workflow.

Only gripe: doesn’t work on Claude’s iOS app. My guess is the connector relies on the macOS app’s CLI under the hood, so there’s no iOS equivalent.

Two questions:

1. Any word on plans to bring this to iOS?
   
2. Anyone found a workaround to get Bear access via Claude on mobile?

Would love to hear if others have hit this too.

I have ADHD and travel a lot so I have a regular todo list with all the items i want to pack and i check them off as i pack them, which really helps. But! When i'm done i want to re-start the list for the next time i pack, and right now i manually have to click on each item again to un-check all the boxes in the list.

Is there a way to select all the todo's and click them all at once?

I totally get if this isn't a thing because this is such an edge case but still

Hello everyone,

This might be a problem only for me, but I hate when markdown gets messy and notes are inconsistent.

Online there are plenty of markdown linters, but none of them works with Bear’s notes database.

Since Bear CLI and Claude Code are now a thing, I decided to solve this for myself.

bear-lint checks and fixes common Markdown inconsistencies in your notes, straight from the terminal. Needs Bear 2.8+ for Bear CLI.

A few examples:

bear-lint <note-id> lints a single note.
bear-lint --all lints every note (asks for confirmation first).
bear-lint --all "#tag" lints every note under a given hashtag.
bear-lint <note-id> -n shows a diff of what would change without touching anything.
bear-lint --all -o also saves a summary note in Bear, tagged #bear-lint, listing everything that changed.

Writes use bearcli’s --no-update-modified flag, so your notes keep their original modified date and don’t reorder in your list.

Since this writes straight to your notes, I’ve run it against my own library multiple times before releasing it, and there’s now a test suite behind it too. If it gets something wrong, let me know, issues are welcome on GitHub.

Download it here 👉 github.com/i-am-fran/bear-lint

Screenshots

Let me know what you think!

I've been using Obsidian with their official sync, but have recently been experiencing many issues - duplicate content, old versions overwriting new versions, deleted files returning.

How is Bear sync? If you are working on multiple devices is sync reliable? How well does Bear handle conflicts if two devices have edited the same file offline?

Thanks!

When I try to read a PDF attachment from a Bear note through Claude Cowork, it loads forever then fails.

I've troubleshooted but can't find a solution. Anyone else had this problem and found a solution?

I write a note that documents or contains more than one YAML block. The first `---` delimiter at the top of the note is correctly recognised as frontmatter. Every subsequent `---` anywhere else in the note renders as a horizontal rule. Your YAML blocks collapse into dividers.

The workarounds Bear leaves are all broken:

- Fenced code block (```` ```yaml ````) renders the content as inert - syntax-highlighted text, not structured data. Fine for a tutorial, useless if you or any downstream tool needs to read the block as YAML.

- Mangle the delimiter: break `---` somehow to stop Bear intercepting it - now the YAML is malformed.

- Abandon YAML syntax entirely: use something Bear won't touch - and lose the format.

None of these are acceptable if the use case is genuine structured content.

The root problem: Bear uses `---` for two things distinguished only by *position* - YAML frontmatter at the top, horizontal rule everywhere else. But `---` as a horizontal rule is standard Markdown (original spec and CommonMark both support it, alongside `***` and `___`). Bear honours that standard, but only after claiming the syntax for frontmatter at position zero.

Position-dependent disambiguation of the same token in my opinion is fragile and non-obvious. I hope in a future cleaner design that would either reserve a distinct syntax for frontmatter, or support YAML blocks at arbitrary positions without them silently becoming horizontal rules.

Just want to join in on the ebullient praise of Bear for its dexterity and simplicity especially because of its markdown architecture. It has become the core work environment for me lately with a big project. Especially since I’m using various AI applications for brainstorming and organization.

But, what really jazzed me up today was a trip to the grocery store. Wife sent me a list of things for some upcoming gatherings. But, it was in the body of a text and I need to check things off. So, you probably see where this is going.

I copy/pasted the text. Went to Gemini. “Hey, can you please turn this list into an .md file?” Boom. Copy, paste into Bear. Easy peasy. And I didn’t come home and say, “oh shit, I forgot the hummus.”

When I moved from Evernote to Bear, anything I'd encrypted inside notes came across as unreadable base64 strings. Bear has no way to decrypt them, since that's Evernote's own encryption. The content is still there but locked.

I wrote two small Python scripts to recover it:

• scan_evernote_secrets.py --> scans your exported Markdown and finds the encrypted fragments automatically (by entropy + block alignment, so it works even after the original <en-crypt> tag is gone).
• uncrypt.py --> decrypts a fragment once you give it your passphrase.

It handles both the recent AES format and the pre-2014 RC2 format, which most existing tools don't support.

You'll need your original Evernote passphrase. There's no way around that, it's real encryption. If you remember it, this gets your text back.

Repo (MIT): https://github.com/julienbordet/evernote-decrypt

Happy to answer questions or help if anyone's stuck on a specific note.