🚀 Bear 2.3 is here: New iOS18 tinted icons, multiple color highlighter, and more

[zowiewho]

It’s Apple season with lots of exciting new features being teased — Bear is ready to take advantage of all the goodies on show plus a brand new feature that empowers your writing experience. Let’s dive in!

Multi Color Highlighter

In Bear 2.3, we’re excited to introduce the highly requested multi-color highlighter feature, giving you the flexibility to choose from five dynamic colors:

• Green
• Red
• Blue
• Yellow
• Purple

Now, you can easily distinguish different types of highlighted content by using multiple highlighter colors—whether it’s highlighting key points, marking sections for further editing, or color-coding tasks.

These colors are also consistent across all Bear themes, ensuring that each highlight color remains easy to recognize and distinguish even when you switch themes. Check Bear Support Doc to learn how to use the multi-color highlighter tool.

New Tinted Color Icons

We’re excited to announce that Bear now fully supports iOS 18’s new Tinted Color Icons!

Whether you prefer bold hues or subtle shades, this feature lets you customize your Bear app icon to match your unique style, adding a tint to all your Home Screen icons.

Control center widgets

Bear now offers quick access to our core features with our brand-new Control Center widgets! Choose from New Note, New To-Do Note, New Scan Document Note, or Search Notes to streamline your workflow and keep your productivity tools just a tap away.

There’s More

We’ve also fixed a bunch of bugs and added some more actions to make life easier. Check out the full Changelog below:

macOS

• Fixed note scrolling glitch
• Fixed Timing.app integration

iOS

• Support for tinted icons
• Support for control center widgets
  • New Note
  • New ToDo note
  • New Scan Document note
  • Search notes
• Restored the correct coloring of Bear’s custom keyboard
• New attachments export menu
• Fixed issue with side actions positioning

coreOS

• New Highlighter colors: It’s possible to choose between 5 different colors for highlighting your notes
• Added more actions to the … menu inside the note
  • Pin/Unpin
  • Trash/Restore
  • Archive/Unarchive
  • Privacy
  • Sort ToDos
• DOCX exporter fixed issue with markdown [unlinked references]
• Minor changes to the existing themes
• Code blocks no longer change height during markdown hiding/showing
• Header links now work correctly if the target header is folded
• Fixed attachments path issue with merged markdown exports
• Fixed wiki link name update bug concerning locked notes
• Fixed an issue with note search and attachments no longer connected to notes
• Better handling of HTML comments during exports
• The Add file shortcuts action now has an extra parameter to limit insertion to a specific header inside the note
• Fixed issue with copy as > HTML when performed from the note list
• Fixed lag popovers appearing lag for notes with a lot of links
• Better handling of inline stylers when they are toggle off inside a word
• Fixed HTML export W3C validation issues
• Fixed issue preventing attachments to be correctly linked in textbundle and BearNote exports when they were in some folding conditions
• Changes in the Quick Open panel search algorithm

Tell us what you think!

Thank you all for your incredible feedback during Bear 2.3 beta testing on multi color highlighter feature. We’d love to hear what you think about all the new features and how you use them: How will you use the new highlighter colors? What tinted icon will you choose? Have you added any new widgets into your control center? Let us know!

That’s all folks, see you next time! Enjoy the new OS and Bear 2.3!

The Bear Team

[srciaran]

My current version is 2.0.3. I don’t see a way to “check for updates” in any menu. How will I update to 2.3?

[albf]

I absolutely hate the new highlighter. Before, the highlight color always matched elegantly with the theme. Now, nothing goes with anything. And I don’t know who needs so many colors in a notes app. After all, it’s not a pdf reader.

[Jake]

Love the option to use different highlight colors if needed. But PLEASE bring back the beautiful, elegant highlight colors back! I use the “Notes” Theme and it use to have an elegant lime’ish green that caught my eye really well. The new highlight color pallet just doesn’t seem to blend with the beauty of this note app. (which was one of the main selling points for me)
Even if the old highlight color was just set as the “default” and then you could choose other colors, that would be great! (e.g., Default/old highlight color; new green; new yellow; new purple, new red; new blue).

[yurivish]

If you’re on a Mac, you should be able to update it through the Mac App Store.

[srciaran]

Something seems to have gone wrong on that count. The app store tells me that it “Cannot Update App - Bear: Markdown Notes cannot be updated because it was refunded or purchased with a different Apple Account.” IDK how that could have happened. I certainly obtained it through the Apple App Store originally, and Bear Pro shows up on my Apple Subscriptions page.

I suppose I could delete and reinstall, but I worry that I will lose all of my notes when I uninstall it, which would be catastrophic.

[yurivish]

Ah, hmm… I’ll let someone from the Bear team chime in with their suggestions, but I think that if you wanted to try it and ensure your notes stay safe, you could make a backup of

~/Library/Group Containers/9K33E3U3T4.net.shinyfrog.bear/Application Data/

which contains the database (database.sqlite) and images + files (the Local files subdirectory).

Source: Where are Bear's notes located (which also suggests quitting Bear before making the backup)

[sgtaylor50]

Easier way is to use the built in backup function.

[macaaron]

@zowiewho

Multi Color Highlighter

Hello, thank you so so much for this feature!!! This is a real value added for my work!

[bolive]

Make sure you do a backup before doing anything.

[srciaran]

It would be great if someone from Bear could help me out here. This is not normal.

[zowiewho]

Hello, @srciaran Bear team comes to the rescue! Let’s try the easy solution first: Please close App Store and open again, if the problem still exists, try reboot your device and see if the problem is resolved.

[Thunderr247]

Love the new update! Multiple highlight colors are a great addition. Great job supporting all the new iOS 18 features on day one!

[danmills7]

That’s a bummer, you don’t like the new colors. I love them!
However, could using the original green color solve your problem?

[danmills7]

@zowiewho I love the new highlighter colors - very useful for me. And all of the other fixes and additions are awesome. Great update!

[AleemShaun]

I feel like the new Sort ToDos function got lost in the highlighting ‘furore’.

Just came here to say thanks! Nice addition!