Bear is more than just a text editor. It’s also a task manager with an advanced search engine and a sophisticated tagging system. Plus, with a Pro subscription, it can be a very pretty text editor. Here’s how to bring more out of Bear.
Bear your tasks
Let Bear care for your tasks, it’s easy. To add tasks into a note, click the Pen icon on the bottom-right corner, then choose Todo to create a checkbox. You can also press Command-T or type - [ ] to do the same, while typing - [x] will create a marked checkbox. Notes with tasks will even have a little progress bar in the Notes pane.
Search with skill
Bear can find more than just honey. Use search operators to refine your search, like double quotation marks (“ ”) to enclose an exact search term. For example, searching for “Johnny Appleseed” will return results that only have both words and not just one.
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”.
Invest in #tagging
If you’re already organising notes with tags, try nested tags and multi-word tags. Typing a word after the hash sign (#) creates a single-word tag, but wrapping words with the sign, like #World Domination#, creates a multi-word tag.
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.
Bear-nefit with Pro
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.