Provided youre in the Apple ecosystem, anyway.
Bear sits between plain text and Evernote, between minimalism and bloat.
In Bears case,it utilizes Markdownso you could format text easily while still maintaining plain text portability.
Bear has recently become my notes app of choice to accompany my favoritelong-form writing software, Ulysses.
Bear also has an interesting pricing scheme thats worth talking about up front.
Its free if you dont need to sync between devices or use custom themes.
If you want that syncing, Bear costs $14.99/year.
This hopefully means Bear will exist and be in development for years to come.
Instead, it just uses hashtags.
This is great for me because hashtags have longworked better for my workflow.
Even better, it’s possible for you to nest tags using a forward slash.
This creates a more traditional looking folder structure.
When you do this, you’re able to navigate between notes really easily.
For me, its essentially a system where I can create my own little Wikipedia.
Its sort of like making a little interconnected website that only you’re able to navigate.
I didnt really understand why Id use this until I started playing around with it.
There are likely a lot more ways to use this I havent thought of yet.
Bear has a few of its own little special tricks too.
My favorite of those little tricks is support for code snippets.
Just right-click, then select Paste From > Code.
Bear can also recognize certain types of data and format them automatically.
Justdownload the web client extension for your web browserand youre all set.
This works pretty much as youd expect.
Its nowhere near as robust asEvernotes web clipper, but it does the job.
Obviously, this doesnt matter to everyone, nor should it, but its still nice.
What Bear Still Needs
Bear isnt perfect, and its missing some features people find essential.
Bear also doesnt have collaboration or publishing features, which could be a turn off for some.
Its also lacking password protection.
If youre even remotely interested in Bear at this point, I recommend just giving it a spin.
If you end up wanting to leave Bear at any point, they make it easy.
Its a strong alternative when you cant bear the bloat of other apps.
