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

Linting a single note

Linting all your notes

Summary note in Bear

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!

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.”

I'm coming from UpNote where you have folder/sub-folder and tagging options. Anyone else similar? Was tagging-only hard to adjust to? Is it just getting into the habit, or savvy use of tags?

Please add support for an explicit page-break marker- such as iA Writer’s +++ or repurposing the standard horizontal rule --- — to trigger pagination when exporting Bear notes to PDF.

Context & Motivation

Currently, it is impossible to directly export a long Bear note into a polished, publication-ready PDF without awkward, accidental page breaks - so you have to output your Bear note to say Word, go into Word to add pagination, then export from Word to a PDF. When you need to change some words, you either do this in Bear and have to redo all the pagination in Word again - or to save time you make the changes in the Word document - so now your Bear note is obsolete….

While Bear excels at beautiful note organization, professional document workflows require manual layout control. Competitors like iA Writer and Ulysses realized early on that true pagination support is essential for long-form creators who export to PDF, and they both support this feature.

Utilizing either a unique +++ marker or repurposing the standard Markdown thematic break (---) would allow us to isolate chapters, title pages, and sections with perfect page breaks upon export, without altering the clean layout of the note editor.

Proposed Implementation

• The Marker: Support +++ on an empty line, or natively parse the standard horizontal rule --- as a page boundary driver.
• The Output: Upon PDF export, the marker is hidden, and the subsequent text is broken onto a new page.
• Settings Toggle: To respect Markdown purists who use horizontal rules strictly for visual separation, add a toggle in Settings > Export (e.g., "Treat Horizontal Rules as Page Breaks in PDF") to turn this parsing On/Off.

Due to the recent price hikes ($99 -> $250) and bugs (e.g. random deletions of portions of text) I am looking to migrate away from Evernote before my subscription renews in October. I have evaluated plenty of alternatives (Joplin, Obsidian, upNote, Standard Notes, Capacities, devonTHINK, Anytype, Craft) and have fallen onto Bear as the best alternative for my use case (no Ai, no tasks, no calendar, just notebooks/tags, nice design, fast editing/sync). Since I only use an iMac and an iPhone the Apple lock-in doesn’t matter. Also the recently released Web app reduces the issue. I have about 15 notebooks, 300 notes and 2000 attachments (1gb). I have some concerns and would love to hear what your take is on the following:

1. As far as I can see in Bear there is no option to add a table of contents (toc) to a note and also there is no toc navigation pane to the right side of the note on the desktop application (as it exists in Evernote or Notion). The only way to access a toc is via the „i“-icon in the top right corner what could be annoying especially when dealing with notes that have plenty of sections (I have some notes with ~30 sections). Have you been experiencing this as limiting and have you even found a workaround? Are there plans to enable adding a toc directly in the note or to provide a navigation pane to the right?
2. I have some notes that are quite large due to plenty of pictures (70-100mb). In Evernote they load fast but as soon as you want to edit it constantly freezes and takes seconds to display changes. How well is Bear performing with such „heavy“ notes? Is it easy to load, edit and sync them?
3. As far as I understand Bear does not provide versioning of individual notes. Meaning I can only backup my entire note stack but after I edit a single note there is no version history that I can fall back onto if I ever accidentally delete something or realize after some time that I want to revert a section to a previous state. I have read on Reddit that some users have built their own python script to mimic a version history themselves. Since a version history is critical as a safety net for me I will need to implement this as well. What have your experiences been with that? Also I have seen that such a version history feature has been requested >2 years ago but nothing has happened as of today. Are there any plans to add that feature?
4. In my Evernote notes I have a lot of internal links (links to other notes), highlights of text and tables. Will the links break or is there a way to have the links cleanly migrate to Bear? Is it correct that all Highlights will be removed? Will tables migrate cleanly or will they break? Is there anything else that might break when migrating?
5. In my Evernote notes I also have about 2000 attachments (.png, .jpeg, PDFs, .txt, .xlsx). Will all of them cleanly migrate to Bear?

Thank you for any insights/help 🙏

I have images inline in my notes and - when I was an Evernote user - used to use the edit-image feature within EN (simple stuff like cropping a screenshot etc).

What's the best way to do this with Bear, on my Mac?

Double clicking the image offers me a preview and the option to 'Open with Preview'... but then the resulting edited image does not seem to save to the original note. What's a nice clean way to do this?

Thank you

The one major issue I have, switching from Apple Notes is the lack of ability to search for a note when sharing a file via the share sheet, instead you need to scroll endlessly…

Has anyone managed to hack this - thinking of a shortcut maybe?