How to Start making notes in Bear

Meet Bear

When you first open Bear you’ll see this cheery welcome screen. This itself is a Bear note: to change the note just click it in the middle section. You’ll see Notes, Trash, and a welcome hashtag on the left.

Get going

Pressing ç+N creates a new note, and from there it’s just a matter of typing. Bear applies the H1 heading style to your note’s first line, and you can use familiar shortcuts such as çB+ and

çI+ to style your text.

Add a link

Bear knows about two kinds of links: web links and links to other notes in Bear. Here we’ve pasted an address straight from Safari’s address bar, and Bear has automatically turned it into a clickable link.

Add an image

Unlike many notes apps and text editors, Bear can show images inline instead of making them attachments or thumbnails – although you can switch to using thumbnails if you prefer. Just drag and drop your image.

Insert media

Here we’ve dragged and dropped a drawing of guitar chords into our note, but you could embed a music file or video if you prefer. If something can be previewed using Quick Look in Finder, it can be previewed inside a note.

Export your notes

Export options are limited in the free version: you can’t generate PDFs, DOCX, or HTML without a Pro account. But you can still export in a range of other standard formats, including plain and rich text, plus Markdown.

Get tagging

To use or create a tag just type a hash and then the tag’s name, without a space in between them. For example,

#maclife. You can assign as many of these tags as you like; they’ll all appear in the black navigation panel.

Make a to-do list

One of our favorite features is Bear’s instant to-do lists. Select the text you want to turn into a list, press ç+T, and each line gets a check box. Clicking a box places a cross in it, and draws a line through the adjacent item.

Share your stuff

Bear also uses macOS’s Share sheet, which enables you to send content to specific apps or services, such as Messages, Notes, Facebook, and Twitter. The list shown depends on what apps you have installed.

Find things again

Tagging makes notes easy to find. By default, the navigation shows top-level tags, but you can nest tags within each other, such as #maclife #issue133. You’ll see a clickable arrow next to a tag in the sidebar if others are nested within it.

Get information

At the very top right of the main window you’ll see an information button. Clicking this shows you the word count and other statistics, and enables you to pin notes so that they stay at the top of their respective tag.

Cut the clutter

If you prefer a really minimal writing environment you can switch between three, two, and one-panel layouts using the little icon at the bottom right of the main window. Full-screen display is available too.