🚀 Bear 2.4: Better encryption, auto todo sorting and pin within tags

[zowiewho]

Big news—Bear encryption just got even better! You can now encrypt notes with attachments, ensuring your most important ideas, documents, and secrets stay safe. This update also introduces smarter To-Do sorting, more flexible pinning, and a smoother overall experience. Let’s take a look together!

Bear 2.4 will require macOS 12.4 and iOS 15.6 or later to support new features and improvements. If you’d rather stay on your current OS, you can turn off auto-updates and update Bear manually.

Encryption, upgraded

For the first time, you can encrypt notes with attachments in Bear (Bear Pro required), meaning you can encrypt any notes in Bear now. Your images, PDFs, and other files are now just as secure as your text, giving you complete peace of mind.

To make this happen, we’ve made a fundamental upgrade to Bear’s encryption system:

We’ve upgraded Bear’s encryption system to encrypt every component of a note, including attachments like images, PDFs, and other files. This ensures everything stays secure and in sync across devices, with smarter checks to prevent conflicts during encryption. Your password is never stored anywhere, ensuring a complete protection of your data. Plus, we have made sure that the new encryption system is ready for Bear on the web when it launches. With these upgrades, your notes and files are more secure than ever.

Please note: You’ll need to update Bear on all your devices to keep sync running smoothly. If you’re on an older version, Bear will kindly remind you to update for seamless syncing.

Sort To-Dos with ease

Your To-Do lists should work for you, not against you. Sometimes a cluttered list of completed and unfinished tasks can be overwhelming. Now, Bear provides a new menu option to automatically moves completed To-Dos to the bottom, so you can always focus on what needs to be done. You can find the setting under Settings > General in Bear.

More Powerful Pinned Notes

Pinning keeps your most important notes within reach, and now it’s even more powerful. With this update:

• Pinned notes inside a tag stay pinned only in that tag. No more clutter across all your notes
• Notes are pinned globally when no tag is selected in the Sidebar
• A new Pinned section under Notes in the Sidebar gathers all pinned notes—both local and global—for easy access
• A refreshed pin icon for a modern and clean look!

For example, you can now pin the House Innovation Plan under #personal and the Annual Work Report under #work separately, keeping them neatly organized without cluttering your All Notes view. At the same time, you can still pin Daily Thoughts globally, so it’s always within reach whenever inspiration strikes.

You can find more information about Pinning here.

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Full Changelog

CoreOS

• New Encryption Support

  • Notes with attachments can now be encrypted
  • Encryption layer changes require native apps to be updated for sync compatibility
  • A warning will prompt users to update if version mismatch is detected

• Automatic Sorting for Completed To-Dos

  • Completed to-dos are now automatically moved to the bottom of checklists.
  • This feature can be enabled in Preferences > General

• Improved Local Note Pinning for Tags

  • Notes pinned inside tags are now only shown as pinned within that tag
  • Notes pinned outside tags still appear pinned across all sidebar locations
  • A new “Pinned” section under Notes lists all locally and globally pinned notes

• Fixes & Improvements

  • Resolved file renaming issues
  • Minor theme color tweaks
  • Fixed crash related to wiki link autocompletion
  • Resolved edge case with @title special search
  • Various localization updates
  • Backups now retain the read-only state of notes
  • CloudKit sync updated to support Apple’s Advanced Data Protection
  • Improved in-note search performance

macOS

• (macOS 13+) Live Text for Images: A small icon now appears in the bottom-right of images to enable Live Text
• Style bar now restores automatically if left open before quitting the app
• Image resizing no longer causes selection change
• Minimum system requirement is now macOS12.4

iOS

• ISO8601 date format is now supported in the BIU keyboard’s date tool. Option can be enabled in Preferences > General
• Enhanced behavior of the virtual keyboard
• Fixed issue with tag folding in the sidebar affecting note list context
• Resolved table paste bug
• Fixed a crash on the Watch app
• Minimum system requirement is now iOS15.6

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Update now!

iOS App Store
Mac App Store

Bear 2.4 is all about making your note-taking experience smoother, smarter, and more secure. Update now and give it a spin—we’d love to hear what you think!

Happy Writing!

The Bear Team

[dcarver]

Fantastic update! I’m surprised ADP support had such a small mention, this is a big deal.

[SquareGorilla81]

So very grateful for ADP being launched! Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!

(I agree, this should be highlighted more directly! You should be mentioning that E2EE is now possible!)

My question is about @matteo’s comment from the 2.4 beta thread:

@matteo

ADP will apply to all new notes, as well as any existing notes you edit. Attachments are already covered by ADP, so no worries there.

We don’t offer a built-in way to convert all old notes, but it’s easy to do if you want:
Just select your notes and make a small change, like toggling them to read-only and back, or pinning and unpinning, and they’ll sync under ADP.

That said, we don’t recommend doing this for everything, since syncing a lot of notes at once can take time. You can always just update the notes you care about most.

Also, keep in mind: that enabling ADP means you won’t be able to use the web version of Bear.

Request #1: I would very much like a way to determine whether notes are synced via ADP or synced the old way. My ideal solution to this would be a special search tag that would let me determine which notes have not been moved over to the new “ADP type.”

I did pin and unpin everything (and it did take a while to sync).

Request #2: You should make these instructions about how to move existing notes over to ADP more clear for users. If someone turns on ADP after using Bear for a while, they may be under the false impression that all their notes are now end-to-end encrypted (E2EE). ADP is mentioned in the release notes, but there’s no way for a user to determine whether they are getting that functionality.

Thank you!

EDIT: I moved these over to feature request / bug report

[dawid]

Just want to thank you for ADP support and full encryption. This is huge.

[sixxis]

Thank you, Bear Team for another amazing update!

[HvdG]

ADP is not mentioned at all in the release notes for 2.4. This makes me wonder if it has perhaps been pulled at the last minute. @matteo, can you clarify this perhaps?

[trix180]

@HvdG

ADP is not mentioned at all in the release notes for 2.4

Sorry, where is not mentioned?

[dcarver]

It’s under “Fixes & Improvements” under coreOS.

[HvdG]

I see it now. It wasn’t in the “Encryption, upgraded” section (where I’d say it should have been), and a search for “ADP” turned up nothing.

So glad that it’s done!

[xierox]

Thank you for adding ADP support.

You guys rock!

[HumbleBear]

Is ADP enabled by default, in Bear, if ADP is enabled on your Apple account - or is there some toggle, somewhere, that I’m missing?

[trix180]

Having ADP enabled on your account is enough to have it working for Bear.

[HumbleBear]

Thanks! Does this enable ADP to function with web or will that not work regardless?

[GenuineSalad]

I’m also popping in to say: thank you for adding ADP and extending encryption Bear team! For a subset of users (of which i am part) this is a huge improvement, and a valid reason to stop looking for alternatives

[dawid]

Same here. Long live Bear!

[andy2]

Great thanks for supporting end-to-end encryption (E2EE) when Advanced Data Protection (ADP) is on! This is indeed the feature I’ve been waiting for to start using Bear seriously.

As far as I understand, the note text and attachments are E2EE, while the metadata like title and tags are not. What about things like search text or previews, are they E2EE (if stored in CloudKit)?

By the way, how hard would it be to make the note title or tags E2EE? Of these, at least for me, the title is the more sensitive piece of information, and therefore would have higher priority.

[zowiewho]

Search text and previews (assuming you mean the preview text in the note list) are E2EE. As for note titles and tags, making them E2EE would make Bear Web impossible to use. We are trying our best to balance between privacy and functionality in a way that works best for most Bear users.

[andy2]

Thanks for the clarification!

[bolive]

Question regarding security and encryption. This 1 question will answer several for me. If I am using something like 1Password and have a secure note there what is the level of security difference Bear’s secure note feature?

Would the “secure/password protected” note in Bear be as secure as the “secure” note in 1Password?