Bear - Markdown Notes

This app shines in the little details: it’s crazy fast, compare it to Apple notes and you will see a night and day difference, especially for long notes. It has table of contents, which makes it easy to navigate long notes. The tag system is miles better than folders. You can manage your todos by following a thin line under each of your notes that shows the progress of your todos in the note. It supports latex! So you can write math formulas now. It has web access. It has a nice menu of themes. It shows you unmentioned backlinks: you can reference other notes that mention the title of your current note. You can lock notes with attachments. You can copy links to each note. You can export to multiple formats. You can draw (although here it’s a bit basic) and have Bear detect words in your images. It gives you useful stats about your notes. And I could keep going. You would not tell half of these when you first open the app, and that’s the point. Its power is modest. It enables you and gets out of the way so you can work. Their dev team is small and slow, but they deliver. Late sometimes, but they deliver. This app is a powerhouse.

I hated the notes app, even tho on iOS it did get a lot better. It still wasn’t enough for me. So I downloaded about 10 note-taking apps, tried them each for a day or two, kept fiddling around, but it was a Goldilocks problem for me. I can’t handle too many options in my organization- I end up creating these ridiculous systems I will never use. But I need a fair amount of functionality, and all the apps I tried where one or the other. Bear was one of the last I tried and I fell in love so fast. It’s minimalistic but, for me, it does everything I need and it does it well. The UI is elegant and cozy and enjoyable to work in. There were a few things I didn’t know how to do right when I started but it wasn’t much a learning curve. I had the basics down once I read through the welcome pages, and then specific questions I had were always in the Support Library or in the community pages. It took me less than a day before I started to feel intuitive using it. I just think it is great, I was gearing up to start using Obsidian but tbh when I watched the first video it linked to it seemed kind of cult-y. I use Bear for all my notes, and since I am trying to write a book, I did decide to use Ulysses for that. But I like to keep my notes and research over here until I have them pared down, then I move them into the project over there. Bear is great- be like Bear, get Bear, and the subscription is a no-brainer. Thank you Bear!! 👏👏👏👏

Bear is ok but the lack of folders is annoying. In fact it’s a deal breaker. In no way does the tag system give more freedom or make things easier, in fact the opposite is true. Just because something is better for you personally doesn’t mean as a business owner you don’t try and accommodate everyone who might possibly be using your product. And answers like “we have determined this is better” don't help. Better for you maybe but not everyone. The hashtag system is ok but a lot of us use folders and without them it makes organization difficult. We can’t nest hashtags into hashtags so the left column is just a jumbled mess, that can never be organized. Every time I open bear It’s like walking into a messy room that I can’t do anything with. Also the reading time estimation is way off. This is an important feature for us in fact one of the only reasons we considered bear so we don't have to take notes from Apple notes into pages, just to find out word count, and then paste into a website to find reading time But bears estimation calculation is severely off by a lot. I did a test and used three different online calculators to determine reading length for some text I wrote, and all came back between 9 and 9:30 minutes. Bear however said 4:45 for the same text. This may not seem like a big deal but is extremely important for what we do.