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.

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?

I'm on MacOS, and my app updated a few days ago and instead of being able to see my 4x4 tables with every box in view on the page (as you would expect), they've changed it so that I can only see up to 2 and a half boxes at a time, and I have to scroll sideways to see the rest. It's lowkey ruined my flow completely and I have no idea how to change it back to how it was.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about and how to change it back so that the full table is always in view like before?

Thanks gang ://

I really love these comments from the Bear team on the new update… 😁

i used to find typing notes for college always a slog, but there is something so addicting about making the notes look very nice and tagging them and making them look all organized. thank you bear!

Made a small shortcut to send notes from Bear to Things and autofill the task. Thought I’d share it in case anyone uses both!

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/d843c321e02b41c6b848987f53eda407

https://reddit.com/link/1wmhm5n/video/393e1n76gwqh1/player

Hello!

I have been all around the block with note taking apps and have come back to bear app. I am debating whether or not to store more sensitive information on the bear app and obviously the most sensitive is on my password managers. But its mainly just work information or notes about people not anything crazy.

I use a mac mainly, but also use a PC to game at home and sometimes do work on that as well. I would love to use the Bear Web app but I do have the iCloud ADP enabled and I know I have to turn that off. From what I am reading, the bear notes even without ADP enabled has some pretty decent encryption that the company themselves cannot see the data? Is that what I am understanding or is that only with ADP enabled. I am debating if web will work for me or if i need to use another system. Thanks!

I'm not sure how many other people would use this, but I quite often would like to display an image's title.

In the screenshot, I've mocked up what it might look like (i.e., just adding text so that it looks like a title, at the bottom).

There are 2 images that are named and could get mixed up when new text is added. If their name could be made visible, they could be moved easily within the note, the name/title would follow and you'd know what each image was.

Is this a niche request?

…or put another way: what are images titles for if they are not displayed by default?

We have opened more TestFlight seats for testing Lettera. Links and feedback instructions are available on the website.

Please be aware that Lettera requires macOS 26 or 27.

Hello

I like Bear but I'm wondering if it's right for me since I'm looking for a true digital cabinet - one where my few 100 notes (so not thousands) can co-exist alongside some audio recordings, lots of PDFs, images and so on. What would be your recommendation be?

Cloud storage is great for files but I cannot write notes around the file so...

Let me add that work will pay for this so the price itself is not so important.

Thank you

Eight years ago, someone asked about separating work and personal notes.

I still can’t find a way to do this adequately.

How are you all doing it, if at all?

Has anyone managed to get this to work?

I have a shortcut with steps;

Get note - shortcut input

Set read only state for Note to true

and have assigned it to the action button but nothing happens. What am I doing wrong?

I input notes and files into Claude Code. Claude then files everything in the right place and can gather it for me when I want. (Example of what I can ask: "What is Nicholas' phone number and what did he tell me last week during our meeting?") All of my info lives Bear (the library), organized by nested tags, not folders. There is also a git repo holding the rules/scripts/history and a nightly read-only mirror of all of my Bear data for safety.

Capture - I say/paste anything into Claude. Claude then routes the new info into the proper tagged note across Work area 1, Work area 2, Work area 3, personal stuff, my book writing, and a reference library. Claude links everything it can into related notes instead of duplicating things.

Example: My dictated input "I applied for x public project on September 18th and 19th in [city] from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Block out those dates on my calendar in case I get the job. Save the resume and cover letter I wrote to accompany my application." Claude did its thing with Bear and my calendar apps and Claude responded back to me with: "In Bear: New note “[Project X Application", tagged personal/career, attachment, status/waiting. It holds both PDFs plus a searchable summary of each pdf, the two forum dates as plain 📅 lines, and links to Career - Job Opportunities, Public Service, Personal MOC and Me. The Career - Job Opportunities page got a new "(applied)" section pointing to it, and Public Service got an xxxx entry under organizations. Changelog line written.”

Retrieval - I ask a question, Claude searches the Bear library (read-only) and answers from what's actually there, with links back to source notes.

Maintenance - Claude does daily/weekly sweeps my Bear inbox. At the end of each week, it archives stale notes (never deletes anything), keeps my MOCs (maps of content) current, and generates a morning briefing each morning of my upcoming project deadlines and status on my projects.

My Guardrails - My tasks live in TickTick, not Bear; nothing gets permanently deleted in Bear, just archived; every structural change gets logged in case of later problems. Backups are in Git if I need them.

Basically, Bear is my library and Claude acts as the librarian by doing 100% of the tagging, filing, and organizing — I just capture in Claude and find Bear info in Claude. Of course, I also add and retrieve stuff from the Bear app directly when that's faster. Since everything is structured properly, it's easy to get stuff into Bear or out of Bear either by myself or through Claude.

simple question but I can't figure this out

I have a 'new note' icon on my iphone lock-screen to quick-add a note. But this always opens a new note in the 'title' area. I want it to open in the body of the note, so i can just type.

Is this possible and if yes, what am I missing?

Thank you