Hi,

I was a daily Bear user for two years, up until the new editor launched. At that point, the app no longer matched my needs, so I had to stop using it.

Recently, I needed a Markdown app that works well with Claude and other AI tools. Obsidian ended up being my only real option, mainly because it can work with local folders and plain Markdown files. The problem is that I do not really enjoy using Obsidian, for me, it feels too complex.

I keep thinking about Bear, because in many ways it is still the app I would prefer to use. What I would love is not for Bear to become a traditional file-and-folder app, but simply to support local folders like Obsidian does. In other words, I am not asking for a more complex folder-based interface inside Bear itself. I am asking for the ability to work with Markdown notes stored in local folders on disk, while keeping Bear’s clean and simple experience.

If Bear could do that, it would be close to perfect for modern AI-assisted workflows.

For those of you who are interested, I'm new to Bear Notes and absolutely loving it, coming from Obsidian. I wanted a Markdown Bible. The challenge was that the one available through Obsidian / or Git MD download — when imported into Bear Notes, each note's title just has a chapter number. So it either says "Chapter One" or "Chapter Four." If you want a Bible that you can link per verse, it doesn't know the name of the book it's part of is.

Using Claude Co-Work, I was able to instruct Claude to add a line of text to each file that matches the parent folder so each one is named correctly. When imported into Bear Notes, you then have it organized by book. Happy to share for those who are interested — it's working a treat.

I'd love to set a reminder for a note that sends me a notification, making the note a sort of "to do" task in and of itself. Is this possible? Sorry if this is a frequently asked question!

I did it. About every 6 months I play with another note taking tool and within a few hours I find a reason to go back to Bear. I was messing with FSNotes which actually looks good for some use cases but I noticed some missing features. Then I read the aggressive FAQs... Ok. I'll stay with Bear and keep waiting for full Panda. https://fsnot.es/faq/

https://preview.redd.it/eby8jvqknuzg1.jpg?width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=580ffc4f00e87371b42c68b407397cfca3dc1e85

One used to be able to search Bear on partial tags, eg #world instead of the full tag #worldaffairs.  This doesn’t work anymore. It’s a real pain, as you now have to remember whether a tag was spelt #book or #books to be able to search on it. 

Bear says they changed how the tag search behaves “because some users pointed out that it can produce undesirable results in some scenarios”.

This unexpected change is a real nuisance when searching with tags.  I have over two hundred tags for my research notes, and now I have to remember exactly how I spelt them (often they’re abbreviations) to search on them - sometimes having to now waste time scrolling through my tag list to track them down first, instead of just typing in the first few letters.

It’s also a nuisance having to type in the complete tag every time for long tag names. For example, I now have to type out tags like #SoloJournallingRPGs in full every time. This gets especially laborious when you have to search on multiple long tags throughout the day

I also have many sets of tags based on the old behaviour - eg tags #Top1, #Top2, #Top3 etc - whereas before I could just type in #Top into search to see the notes for all of them, this ability is now gone.  (I realise I could do the same with nested tags, but this was simpler and less cluttered - and now I have to recode dozens of sets of tags using this).

It would be great if Bear could go back to the way their UI used to work for searching with tags.

Very very annoying with large notes. What a terrible design. Either save scroll position or start at the top.