I tried using Bear many years ago. My issue with it was that while it was using markdown to format, everything is locked away in a SQLite DB, which kills a significant benefit of markdown notes.

I like Obsidian because it’s just stores a folder full of markdown files, and I can read/edit those files with whatever I want. It feels like a lot less lock-in than with Bear.

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LVB 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I do understand the sentiment, but a couple of things that make it ok for me: 1. exporting everything is simple 2. the official bear CLI is quite capable, and Claude has no trouble using it to handle all manner of searching, organizing, you name it.

	▲	al_borland 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Exporting is nice and all, but that is cumbersome if I want to edit something in place using a different app. For example, there are some things with Obsidian where it would be much easier to do what I'm trying to do in a full code editor, like VS Code. It's nice to be able to just open up the file, make my edits, save it, and instantly see the changes reflected in Obsidian. In another case, I wanted to easily log things throughout the day and append a file I had in Obsidian. Being a simple text file, I was able to do this with Bash, Hammerspoon (Lua), and AppleScript at various points in time... having to learn and use a special CLI command to append text to a file feels like overkill. Having to use an LLM to search text also feels like overkill. One of the things I like markdown notes for is the simplicity of it. I can just use grep if I want. I can open the files on a computer from 1990 or 2090 and it will work. Having to bring in all these other tools into the mix hurts that utility. At that point, I might as well just use Apple Notes.

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sandgiant an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Shiny Frog, the team behind Bear, have been working on a file backed notes app for years. Recently revived and rebranded from Panda to https://lettera.md.