3 Ways to Be a Bear Power User

Bear may have one of the simplest designs of any note-taking app out there, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of advanced features to save you time. Here are three of our favorites.

As anyone who creates a lot of notes will soon discover, search results can quickly become overwhelming. That is, unless you know how to set the right criteria.

First the basics: You can enclose a phrase in quotation marks when searching (“A star is born”) and use a hyphen to exclude specific words from search. Warriors -Golden -State, for example, finds instances of “warriors” but not “Golden State Warriors.”

But Bear also supports a number of special search tags, which are preceded with @. For example, @task finds all notes with task lists embedded, while @todo shows notes with incomplete tasks. And @images surfaces only notes with images. To see just the notes you’ve edited today or yesterday, use @today or @yesterday.

You’re probably already familiar with basic tagging in Bear: Type #travel anywhere in notes related to an overseas trip, for example. But if you need more flexibility, take advantage of Bear’s advanced tagging features.

To create multiple-word tags, surround a phrase with the # symbol (e.g., #New Year’s Resolutions#).

Or nest tags using a slash: #food/french. Only the parent tag (food, in this case) appears in Bear’s sidebar, but you can expand that to see all subtags.

You can also use what Bear calls Special Searches. For example, typing @yesterday into the search box will find yesterday’s notes. @todo will find notes with uncompleted tasks (useful) and @images will find notes with pictures. You can even combine Special Searches, like a search for @yesterday @todo with “Johnny Appleseed”.

To quickly create notes from links and text snippets on the Web, install the Bear browser extension. Just click the Bear button in your browser’s toolbar to save the contents of the current webpage as a new note, or select text to include only that section.

Next, try nesting tags by inserting a forward slash (/) and adding another tag, like #World Domination/Step One#. This creates a #Step One tag that’s saved within the #World Domination tag.

If you’ve enjoyed using Bear, a Bear Pro subscription will bear even more benefit. Notes will sync seamlessly on macOS and iOS versions of the app over iCloud. You’ll have more than 12 curated themes to choose from and exporting options for more formats like PDF, Word, and JPG.

Bear Markdown Notes

Create, Tag, Export, Encrypt

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