Bear is a beautiful, powerfully simple Markdown app to capture, write, and organize your life. You can take notes, plan your day, journal thoughts, organize tables, create lists and tasks, sketch ideas, link notes together, write a book, and much more.
This is a quick guide to get you started with Bear’s most important and useful features. Of course, there is much more to discover on our blog and support docs. You can also reach out to us on Reddit and Twitter with questions and feedback.
Step 1: Create a new note
Open Bear, click the New Note button, and start typing. The first line of every note is its title, the rest is up to you.
Step 2: Style text
Want to bold or highlight text, or add headings, links, and lists? Click the BIU button to toggle all our formatting tools.
Step 3: Organize notes
Notes are organized with #tags. Add one or more tags to a note, and they’ll appear in the Sidebar on the left. Click a tag there, and it will show all notes containing that tag. If you need ideas for tags, try #work or #errands or #blog or #ideas or #recipes.
Step 4: Search notes
Click the search box at the top of the Note List to search all your notes. Simply type any keyword or tag. You can also use tricks from search engines like placing ‘OR’ between multiple keywords, or search for an exact phrase by “surrounding it with quotes.” We have many more search tricks to learn in our support doc.
Step 5: Details about your note
To learn stats about your note like word count or read time, click the ⓘ button to display the Info Panel. The first tab in the panel includes various stats and recent modification dates. The next tab is the Table of Contents, automatically created based on headings 1-6 in the note. The third tab is Backlinks, which displays all other notes that link to the current note.
Step 6: Attach photos or files
Want to add photos, PDFs, or other attachments? Click the BIU button again, then:
- Mac: In the Style Bar, click the photo button to attach any kind of file
- iOS: In the Style Keyboard, click the camera button to take a new photo. Long-press on the camera button for more attachment options, including scanning documents
Step 7: So much more to explore
Of course, this is just the beginning. Bear supports tons of great features like nested tags and Wiki links and sketching and so much more. We’d love to hear your thoughts at Reddit, Twitter, and directly at bear@shinyfrog.net.