I have a love-hate relationship with notes apps. I've been looking for "the one" for a long time, but I can't even explain what I expect from it, so the search is basically impossible. I used Obsidian for quite a while and ended up getting tired of it, I'm going to give Bear a try
It just so happens I am looking for a solid knowledge management application. Too bad this is Apple-only.
I've gone from Obsidian, to LogSeq, to Org-mode on Emacs a few days ago, and I think I'm probably going to stay there.
I'm no expert on the subject, but I'm pretty sure Obsidian is winning not because it's great, but because it mostly doesn't suck, and it runs everywhere. I have little doubt that Bear is a better app than Obsidian.
on the surface, it's a boring hierarchical note taking app, and you can use it just as one, keeping things simple. But then, you can jump into the rabbit hole and figure out how attributes, templates and properties inheritance can give your notes a structure, be organized as collections, and become a very dependable PKMS.
I personally settled on Trilium after a long search for a PKMS to fit my needs, including Obsidian, LogSeq and many others. My top criteria were:
- I need typed notes: if I'm set to maintain long references of People, Places, Movies, … I want the system to keep track of types, attributes, and relations, just like a RDBMS would. In practice, many systems fail at that and give you a ton of maintenance work just to keep your knowledge base consistent, well-structured and usable
- I need something that syncs with my server at home, and lets me work offline when needed. Trilium client app does that without fuss nor requires subscription/premium/membership.
- I need r/w access to my notes on devices which I don't own (e.g. a work computer), so a fully-featured and secure web version with MFA must exist as an alternative to a client application, and again, Trilium delivers there.
I've been daily-driving Trilium for almost 3 years now, and I haven't stumbled upon an alternative with envy. OTOH, Trilium got (much) refined and gained lots of clever features.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have built a lightweight, note taking application that focuses on quick note taking, and fully keyboard based usage. Notes are all one liner, and it supports minimum Markdown, you can manage tasks, reminders, do inline calculations, unlimited undo/redo. You can organize notes by project and categories.
The indispensable feature of LogSeq for me was structuring my notes into blocks and being able to link to those blocks in other areas. My thoughts flow into each other and I'd like to be able to document those links. Org-roam is what (kind of) allows this for me.
hello org-mode friend! I've been on a similar journey and over the last month I've just been vibe building a replacement for logseq. So far: native macOS, high polish (I was a Bear user before logseq), and uses pi-durable so I can launch an agent from any line.
Notes end up being process, too. It's basically a way of being intentional with how you apply your attention throughout changing mental contexts. I might have a really good idea today and then six months from now it's just totally off of my radar. Notes help with that context switching.
Unknown to the incurious public and unknown to humanity are two different things
"It" may not "all be known" but thanks to Einstein and other physicists we can be confident we're not going to find resolution to human biology's real problems circumlocuting entirely rhetorical political and economic theory shat out of academia the last 30 years of the 1900s, or same old religious allegory
Whole lot of information is 100% noise; as forgetable without issue as what you had for dinner on March 27, 2003; yeah you forget and don't track a lot of stuff that keeps you alive; I doubt sending an email on schedule matters much either. Just our contemporary social and communal role-play.
What's left to learn is pretty much moon shot physical experiment; generic office work 10s of millions are skilled in is not going to move the needle
>but thanks to Einstein ... we can be confident we're not going to find resolution ... circumlocuting entirely rhetorical political
I'd think we'd have Plato and Aristotle to thank for public illustrations demonstrating the limitations of utility in sophistry. And even they were probably not the first to realize that the hot air wooing the counselors was nothing more than theater.
My point was not about who coined terms like "fraud", but examples of the kind of work that matters.
Plato and Aristotle were still largely philosophers. Their work was superficial rhetorical induction; writing how sun go up there, go down there pattern, jist deciding the universe was organized with Earth at the center; we fail kids today who would give that as an answer. Not sure why Aristotle is still held up as especially smurt since he was dumber than a modern 12 year old.
While they influenced habits and practices in STEM their results have almost entirely been superseded many times; dubious to try and draw a line from them to today; centuries of the same old human politicking, mud hut tribalism ruled most of humanity for centuries after they lived.
Meaning 150ish years after electromagnetism and relativity are published and look at the world we live in. For us society effectively started in the late 1800s not in ancient Athens
I'm gradually replacing most of the software I use with software I conjure myself, and Bear is the reason I'm probably never going to write an editor; it's not clear to me how I could improve it. Emacs is probably out the door by the end of 2027, but I'd be surprised if I wasn't still using Bear for years from now. It's quite good.
Interesting — I'd say the editor is actually Bear's weakest spot. I keep fighting it all the time and wish it didn't try to do things "automagically" for me.
For example, editing a set of tags causes endless frustration. I can never guess what the tool will do next or what it expects me to do.
I've written about this a bunch before and wasn't looking to take the thread off on a tangent; I'm really just saying how much I like Bear. Bear is great. I don't think I could come up with many ways to make it suit me better, which is not something I can say about a lot of other software.
I'd rather buy (if it's actually some semblance of ownership) a very good app made by people who spend their time keeping it good, then attempt to think I'm the best one to make all of my software. If it's a subscription for something that's not necessarily great and it can be remade cheaply and maintained with low overhead, then the answer is clearer.
I see people vibing out markdown apps like they take their morning shit, while I just paid Bear a small amount of money and have gleefully used it every day for 10 years, and I hope to continue to use it for at least the next 5.
Part of maturity for me over the years has been picking my battles carefully and reducing the things I feel I need to be opinionated about or responsible for. Not every piece of software needs to be perfectly customizable for my workflow or the fastest or embody some esoteric philosophical ideal. Being forced to do anything is a rarity unless your job requires you to use SharePoint or Notion or whatever
See, I could not in fact make a good movie. But I'm very sure there are apps I can do a good job with; I am in fact a professional software developer. So that comparison doesn't seem super on-point.
I've been a long-time user of Bear and I remember when they first launched. I think it's one of those apps that made history for its clean UI and macOS-like experience.
Lately I've been trying some of the markdown file-based editors, mostly to be able to view and edit documentation written by LLMs while working on projects.
I've tried a few. Obsidian, Cogito (in beta) and ZenNote, which I see no one mentioned. For now I settled with ZenNotes because it came with vim motions out of the box. But I'm also liking the Cogito approach, with a much cleaner UI.
I don’t know how apps like this will survive, honestly. Bear is a nice app; I used it back in the day. but what’s the point when you can just build your own custom version of this in about an hour?
I think the moat is taste and polish. You can practically one-shot the first 80%, but the other 20% can take a long time, and the last 1% can be even longer.
If you want the basics, sure. If you want a well-polished app with no sharp edges, I think we're still not there yet.
Bear is such a fantastic app. They nailed the editor feel and function early on and then have consistently improved stability and performance ever since.
They worked on a file backed editor at some point called Panda, but decided to scrap it due to the trade offs of not controlling the storage format. Really respect the focus on their core USP.
Edit: Looks like Panda was recently revived under a new name and is currently in beta: https://lettera.md.
The support is super friendly and responsive and sync just works perfectly and consistently.
Their only response to the AI mania has been adding an official embedded cli to interact with the DB safely.
They are currently working on a web client. This has me slightly worried, but it's apparently been a recurring request for people forced to use Windows at work. I trust they know what they're doing.
I really like Bear, but the built in Markdown editing is trying to be too smart for its own good and is often frustrating. So much that I am now also paying for a Drafts subscription. And to be honest, if Drafts suddenly started supporting drag&drop images (think lab notebook with oscilloscope screenshots), I'd be dropping Bear.
Bear also becomes noticeably slower once you drop all those images into your database.
I’ve been building something like bear for a bit, https://blackbear.app. Supports a few more things than notes (sheets, slides, docs, audio and video files, etc.), with the key differentiator being real time collaboration and collocation of files alongside your calendar and tasks. It’s a passion project, love the bear project as well, definitely an inspiring company
I've been using Bear for a VERY long time. It's still my go-to note taker, but lately I find myself using an AI transcription/note taker tool for meetings with other people. It's the only thing that has me loosening my grip on Bear.
For example, I can ask my AI note taker things to look through all of my meeting notes with a particular customer and pull out some testimonials for my website.
I’ve used Bear for years now and it’s great for writing notes and composing essays. I should probably subscribe to Bear Pro but they don’t have a lifetime option and I despise subscription models.
Luckily the paywall is mostly for export tools and cloud backup. The latter I don’t need, and it’s only a minor inconvenience to use Airdrop + pandoc for the former.
I've been using Bear for a long time. I tried Obsidian to move off Bear, but it didn't last long. The Bear UX is just great and that's what's kept me around this long.
I use both Bear and Obsidian. I do some long-form writing in Bear but keep all of my structured notes and markdown in Obsidian. Obsidian has much better tooling and many more features, but Bear has a very pleasant experience for writing. It's very simple but if it's all you need it's very polished.
If I had to choose one I'd use Obsidian because Bear's features are a subset of what Obsidian does, but Bear is still nice.
I pay for Bear because it’s a native app and not in the weird uncanny valley of Electron apps that almost feel native until you hit the rough edges. It syncs with iCloud. It supports Shortcuts. It’s as responsive to keystrokes and keyboard shortcuts as any other Mac app. Basically, it just feels good to me and I enjoy using it.
Obsidian’s awesome. It’s also an ADHD tarpit for me. I can way too easily get distracted into optimizing my workflow instead of, you know, just typing notes into it. That’s a me problem, not a them problem. I don’t mean it as a criticism against Obsidian. It’s just not the right tool for me.
I've gone from Obsidian, to LogSeq, to Org-mode on Emacs a few days ago, and I think I'm probably going to stay there.
I'm no expert on the subject, but I'm pretty sure Obsidian is winning not because it's great, but because it mostly doesn't suck, and it runs everywhere. I have little doubt that Bear is a better app than Obsidian.
https://reflect.app/
https://github.com/team-reflect/reflect-open
Original HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35303670
on the surface, it's a boring hierarchical note taking app, and you can use it just as one, keeping things simple. But then, you can jump into the rabbit hole and figure out how attributes, templates and properties inheritance can give your notes a structure, be organized as collections, and become a very dependable PKMS.
I personally settled on Trilium after a long search for a PKMS to fit my needs, including Obsidian, LogSeq and many others. My top criteria were:
- I need typed notes: if I'm set to maintain long references of People, Places, Movies, … I want the system to keep track of types, attributes, and relations, just like a RDBMS would. In practice, many systems fail at that and give you a ton of maintenance work just to keep your knowledge base consistent, well-structured and usable
- I need something that syncs with my server at home, and lets me work offline when needed. Trilium client app does that without fuss nor requires subscription/premium/membership.
- I need r/w access to my notes on devices which I don't own (e.g. a work computer), so a fully-featured and secure web version with MFA must exist as an alternative to a client application, and again, Trilium delivers there.
I've been daily-driving Trilium for almost 3 years now, and I haven't stumbled upon an alternative with envy. OTOH, Trilium got (much) refined and gained lots of clever features.
I probably sound like the fan that I am, but you can have a look by yourself at https://app.triliumnotes.org/
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.
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.
https://mtarin.com/projects/nift/
Core point is simplicity, and frictionless note taking, and high performance, my dev version, can work with 12k notes without any issues.
Data is stored as text file.
Demo version is also available
I am looking for feedback, and wondering what would make people actually interested to buying this.
It's completely hand written, no AI assisted code.
Maybe you have perfect memory, but I have found it critical for my job.
it's all already known
"It" may not "all be known" but thanks to Einstein and other physicists we can be confident we're not going to find resolution to human biology's real problems circumlocuting entirely rhetorical political and economic theory shat out of academia the last 30 years of the 1900s, or same old religious allegory
Whole lot of information is 100% noise; as forgetable without issue as what you had for dinner on March 27, 2003; yeah you forget and don't track a lot of stuff that keeps you alive; I doubt sending an email on schedule matters much either. Just our contemporary social and communal role-play.
What's left to learn is pretty much moon shot physical experiment; generic office work 10s of millions are skilled in is not going to move the needle
I'd think we'd have Plato and Aristotle to thank for public illustrations demonstrating the limitations of utility in sophistry. And even they were probably not the first to realize that the hot air wooing the counselors was nothing more than theater.
Plato and Aristotle were still largely philosophers. Their work was superficial rhetorical induction; writing how sun go up there, go down there pattern, jist deciding the universe was organized with Earth at the center; we fail kids today who would give that as an answer. Not sure why Aristotle is still held up as especially smurt since he was dumber than a modern 12 year old.
While they influenced habits and practices in STEM their results have almost entirely been superseded many times; dubious to try and draw a line from them to today; centuries of the same old human politicking, mud hut tribalism ruled most of humanity for centuries after they lived.
Meaning 150ish years after electromagnetism and relativity are published and look at the world we live in. For us society effectively started in the late 1800s not in ancient Athens
For example, editing a set of tags causes endless frustration. I can never guess what the tool will do next or what it expects me to do.
Why?
Compare that to being forced to use someone else's highly opinionated software that might have paid pro features you need or don't need.
What a strange question to ask.
I see people vibing out markdown apps like they take their morning shit, while I just paid Bear a small amount of money and have gleefully used it every day for 10 years, and I hope to continue to use it for at least the next 5.
Part of maturity for me over the years has been picking my battles carefully and reducing the things I feel I need to be opinionated about or responsible for. Not every piece of software needs to be perfectly customizable for my workflow or the fastest or embody some esoteric philosophical ideal. Being forced to do anything is a rarity unless your job requires you to use SharePoint or Notion or whatever
Lately I've been trying some of the markdown file-based editors, mostly to be able to view and edit documentation written by LLMs while working on projects.
I've tried a few. Obsidian, Cogito (in beta) and ZenNote, which I see no one mentioned. For now I settled with ZenNotes because it came with vim motions out of the box. But I'm also liking the Cogito approach, with a much cleaner UI.
If you want the basics, sure. If you want a well-polished app with no sharp edges, I think we're still not there yet.
They worked on a file backed editor at some point called Panda, but decided to scrap it due to the trade offs of not controlling the storage format. Really respect the focus on their core USP.
Edit: Looks like Panda was recently revived under a new name and is currently in beta: https://lettera.md.
The support is super friendly and responsive and sync just works perfectly and consistently.
Their only response to the AI mania has been adding an official embedded cli to interact with the DB safely.
They are currently working on a web client. This has me slightly worried, but it's apparently been a recurring request for people forced to use Windows at work. I trust they know what they're doing.
To be honest I just use a code editor with markdown files in a folder now. The journey is over.
Bear also becomes noticeably slower once you drop all those images into your database.
For example, I can ask my AI note taker things to look through all of my meeting notes with a particular customer and pull out some testimonials for my website.
It even lets you switch to "Source Mode" for quick edits.
Luckily the paywall is mostly for export tools and cloud backup. The latter I don’t need, and it’s only a minor inconvenience to use Airdrop + pandoc for the former.
> Back in 2013, three friends who loved Apple and design couldn’t find a notes app they liked, so they built their own. That side project became Bear.
“Bear is a beautiful, powerfully simple Markdown note taking app to capture, write, and organize your life.”
https://bear.app/
If I had to choose one I'd use Obsidian because Bear's features are a subset of what Obsidian does, but Bear is still nice.
I pay for Bear because it’s a native app and not in the weird uncanny valley of Electron apps that almost feel native until you hit the rough edges. It syncs with iCloud. It supports Shortcuts. It’s as responsive to keystrokes and keyboard shortcuts as any other Mac app. Basically, it just feels good to me and I enjoy using it.
Obsidian’s awesome. It’s also an ADHD tarpit for me. I can way too easily get distracted into optimizing my workflow instead of, you know, just typing notes into it. That’s a me problem, not a them problem. I don’t mean it as a criticism against Obsidian. It’s just not the right tool for me.
Images appear as thumbnails in the notes-list.
Minimal tags-first organization, rather than Obsidians poorly thought out mix of files and tags.
...and that's it. It's the only app that has never given me any reason to switch in ~10 years.