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3 Ways to Be a Bear Power User

Master advanced tags and more in this stellar notes app.

Bear: Markdown Notes

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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.

Search smartly

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.

Bear’s browser extension makes it easy to save text from the web; the app’s advanced search features let you quickly find what you’re looking for.

Tag like a pro

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.

Create notes from within your browser

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.