How I use Apple Notes and Bear Together

#applenotes #bearnotes #notetaking

🐻I love Bear Notes. The UI is gorgeous, it’s fast on mobile and Mac, and typing in Markdown is (for me) faster. I love how portable my files are in Bear too. Easy to export in so many formats, effortless to import things into Bear. The feature set in Bear has also improved massively these last two years, with TRUE backlinks and unlinked mentions. Bear also now has web access, a massively updated web clipper, and tons of other little features that make it very powerful. And lest not we forget the beautiful themes in Bear. I love Bear’s themes. For writing, Bear is crazy fast and easy and pleasant to use.

But there are times when Apple Notes is better for my needs. Shared notes is a big one; our family shares A LOT of things via Apple Notes and we need to all have access to that information. Quick Notes is another feature that I use often, especially on mobile. Apple Notes is also better at quickly storing things, like a digital filing cabinet 🗄️. I have also found that Apple Notes gets REALLY laggy and glitchy when notes get long or there’s over about 2,000 notes saved.

Because of these competing needs, I use both of these apps together. Someone on Bluesky recently asked me to explain my “workflow” with these two apps, so here is my best attempt to lay it out. It relies heavily on accessing deep links for both systems (will note here that it is MUCH easier to access deep links in Bear notes).

💼 Work stuff is all done in Bear. The biggest reason is that a lot of my work really benefits from backlinks and unlinked mentions, neither of which Apple Notes has (Apple Notes does have basic links, but NOT backlinks. They are different). Unlinked mentions is a game changer.

📇 Contacts are all stored in Bear. The biggest reason is that most of my contacts that appear in notes are work-related contacts. But the other reason is that even if I do need to link a contact in Apple Notes, it is MUCH easier to get a deeplink out of Bear than it is out of Apple Notes. Copying a Bear Notes deeplink is insanely easy from the note menu’s ‘copy link’ function.

🏡 Family and home stuff all lives in Apple Notes, because that is the app that allows me to easily share that information with other members of my family. Also, a lot of what we store in Apple Notes are scanned documents and other random tidbits, which work better in Apple Notes. Apple Notes’ scanning function is

✈️ Travel planning is also done in Apple Notes. Again, sharing is a big reason why, but it’s also because Apple Notes does a better job in my experience of handling the types of information I need to save and find during a trip. For example, PDF documents, web links, etc. All easier to find in Apple Notes.

📢 Blogging straddles both apps. When I draft my blog posts, it is easer to do so in Bear. Markdown is fast, and Bear gives me the ability to resize images within the app (a hugely underrated feature). However, I publish my blog via Apple Notes using Quotion. I have tried a few other blogging platforms, but Quotion works best for my needs at the moment. Mostly I love how easy Quotion makes it to publish posts directly from my phone.

📆 Month notes live in Apple Notes, with a heavy amount of linking to Bear. I am still experimenting with this particular part of my workflow, so it is subject to change. Right now, every month has a note within Apple Notes with the title format YYYY-MM. However, within that month note are deeplinks to things I am working on in Bear. Again, this is still a work in progress, but because it is easier to get deeplinks out of Bear, this is how we’re going to roll for now.

I am always refining this workflow but there is where I have landed for the time being