Writing on Mac made easy

How Bear can manage your ideas, lists and much more Bear is a combination of two kinds of app: to-do lists and distractionfree writing

it will take

15 minutes

you will learn

How to add, organise and export notes in the Bear app.

You’ll need

Bear, free from the Mac App Store.

How many different bits of information do you need to carry around in your head or on

your Mac at one time? If you’re anything like us, it’s a lot; shopping lists and to-do lists and things to remember and things to download later and things to look up and things to find out about and… we’re tired just thinking about it. Wouldn’t it be great if you could shove all of that into a simple app that enables you to find what you need whenever you need it? That’s Bear.

Bear is a combination of two kinds of app; it’s a note-taking/to-do app, and it’s a writing app too. It supports Markdown formatting and can export in a wide range of file formats, and it comes with a generous selection of import and export options to get information from and to your existing apps. There’s a companion iOS app for both iPhone and iPad, although if you want to sync between different devices you’ll need a Pro subscription. That also gives you Handoff, so you can start typing a note on one device and it’ll appear instantly if you switch to another.

What makes Bear a brilliant app is the way it makes everything effortless. As we’ll see in our how-to, it doesn’t matter whether you’re writing a book or jotting down a shopping list: Bear enables you to get things done with a couple of keystrokes.

It automatically inserts images and formats links, and you can even link Bear notes together for easy cross-referencing or document management. It shows you word counts and average reading times, and its use of tags makes it easy to file content and find it when you need it in a hurry.

Should you go pro?

Bear’s developers have taken an unusual approach; they’ve put almost all of the important features in the free app. However, a Pro subscription does unlock some really useful goodies – you get the ability to use themes to change Bear’s appearance, advanced exporting in PDF, HTML, DOCX, JPG and RTF formats, and syncing between multiple Mac and iOS devices.

That’s just £1.29 per month or £13.99 for a year, and you get a month’s free trial too. That sounds like a bargain to us, but in this tutorial we’ll stick with the free version to discover what you can get without paying a penny. Take a look at the following steps and see what you think.