Bear - Markdown Notes

I have been using Evernote heavily since 2009. In recent years, as it has become incrementally more bloated and more expensive, I’ve been looking for a replacement, but everything I found was missing some particular feature that I needed. Bear, while much simpler, and ostensibly less powerful, does absolutely everything I REALLY need for organization, writing, business tracking, and creative thought. It does it in a visually beautiful way, with a markup language that really makes the tool fade into subconscious and lets me record thoughts without distraction of too many buttons and gimmicks. Tagging, note linking, formatting, and organization are completely intuitive. The cost is far less than Evernote Premium, and there are not restrictions with using on all of my Apple devices. I hope they can implement note sharing without messing with their formula, and I hope they expand to other platforms so I can share with friends, coworkers, and family, but if it stays just as it is today, Bear will continue to be the foundational piece of my workflow and creative and business processes.

Oh my gosh- coming from the apple notes app, this is like a dream come true. I was getting so frustrated with the apple notes app once portions of my notes just started DISSAPEARING- yes, that’s right- paragraphs and paragraphs of text just started not being there. So frustrating!! So I went on google to research best notes app for ipad/iPhone and came across Bear- it’s FANTASTIC!!! The hashtag that makes folders? Brilliant. The check mark boxes for to do lists- that I can actually check off and have a strike through go through that to-do line item? Brilliant. I LOVE this app. So glad the other one started losing my data so I could find something WAY better- the Bear app. Everyone should use this it’s awesome. I upgraded to the $15 plan per year which is nothing for what it achieves for me with the cross syncing with my devices- I’m constantly switching between my pad and phone so that’s a must for me. Thank you guys you really thought about things intuitively for your users. You guys rocks.

I think bear is the perfect level of robust, and simplicity as far as note apps go. I have been obsessed with trying to find the perfect writing and notes app and I just keep coming back to Bear. The main drawback for me is that I have a windows PC as a gaming computer that I can’t run it on being an iOS/macOS exclusive but they supposedly have a web interface in the works. I switched back to Evernote for a while just because of the cross platform issue but I just felt myself missing Bear and the syntax highlighting and simple tag and search system and I decided to stop fighting it and just enjoy it. Because it’s so great and the team is very transparent about their plans and care about their users. When I was spending time switching apps from bear to Evernote or OneNote, bear was always the easy one to work with when exporting and importing as well. It’s just a pleasure to use all around for me. Minor complaint that I have is when sharing on IOS to the app, it’s very difficult for me to put the new note in a specific place. I can just tag it in a location so I can find it later but I think little pop up share window could have some more navigation options. Thanks devs and designers for the steady quality updates and this wonderful simple app! Maybe one day you’ll find some way to make this cross platform or have a good web interface but I like it enough to stay.

If you just want to jot down quick bits of info and save them into an archive you largely forget about, Apple Notes works just fine. If you want to journal and keep a diary of your life, maybe give Day One a try. But if you want to take notes, write in robust Markdown syntax, save outlines and concepts, refer back to past insights, cross-reference relevant topics, organize everything by incredibly flexible tags, and import and export documents with ease: then Bear is hands-down the best tool for the job. I've tried a ton of different editors over the years and used a variety of different storage systems. Only Bear has proved to be the most flexible, visually appealing, and performant for everything I need out of a Markdown-based document workflow (on both iOS and Mac). I'm slowly weaning myself of all other note/writing apps and making Bear the center of my content world. I highly recommend you investigate doing the same!

I use Bear to take notes on school and often access it from each of my devices (MacBook, iPad, and iPhone). While I’ve had a wonderful experience with it on all these devices, there’s one specific area where the iPad version is crippled in comparison to the Mac version, and this is the “find” functionality. On a Mac, you can easily search for keywords within a particular notebook (or hashtag, or what have you). Once you locate the note where the keyword is located, you can then search within that note. On the iPad, this is somewhat different. You *can* search within a notebook, however you can not search within a particular note. This is such a small thing, but it has made the iPad version significantly less useful for me. I’d love if I could have the same functionality on both devices and I’d up my review to a 5/5 if a future update addressed this. Otherwise, this is a wonderful app and I recommend it to everyone.