We’re shipping something we’ve been looking forward to for a long time: a way for external tools to access your Bear notes.
Bear already lets you access your notes through x-callback-url and Apple Shortcuts, and those work great for a lot of use cases.
With this beta, we’re adding more powerful options for macOS, aimed at developers, power users, and anyone who wants to connect Bear to the tools they already use: a command-line utility plus new, convenient ways to integrate this utility with e.g. AI tools.
This means you can ask an AI assistant to do things like tidy up old notes, find everything you wrote about a topic across hundreds of notes at once, or hook an external tool to automatically create a fresh note every morning, all without opening Bear yourself.
Bear CLI
bearcli is a new terminal tool that lets you read, search, create, and edit notes from outside the Bear app. It’s bundled directly inside Bear, you’ll find it at /Applications/Bear.app/Contents/MacOS/bearcli. Run bearcli -h to see everything it can do, it’s a complete reference and a good place to start.
bearcli search "@todo #work" --format json
bearcli create "Trip Notes" --content "# Italy..." --tags "travel"
bearcli append --title "Journal" --content "Another entry"
It supports all of Bear’s search syntax, and the same operations you’d do inside the app. Encrypted notes can be listed but not read or edited.
If you want to use it from the terminal without typing the full path every time, you can add a symlink:
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin && sudo ln -sf /Applications/Bear.app/Contents/MacOS/bearcli /usr/local/bin/bearcli
Claude connector (no setup required)
If you have Claude Desktop, In Bear macOS go to Help → Advanced → Install Claude Connector, and Bear will set everything up for you. After that, you can open Claude and just… talk to your notes:
- “What did I write about my Italy trip?”
- “What are all my open todos tagged with work?”
- “Create a note summarising what we just talked about”
- “What notes did I change this week?”
No terminals, no configuration files. The CLI is for people who want to build things on top of Bear. The Claude connector is for everyone else who just wants to access their notes in a new way.
MCP server
bearcli also includes a MPC server (bearcli mcp-server) that lets MCP-compatible clients like Claude Code or certain IDEs connect to your Bear notes directly. It’s the same set of operations, just accessible to tools that speak that protocol.
A note on AI
The CLI and MCP server are not AI-specific, they’re general-purpose tools for accessing Bear data from the outside. We’re starting with a Claude connector because that’s what we use internally, but the same foundation works with any tool that supports the CLI and MCP server, and we plan to build on it from there.
Test and feedback
If you’re on the macOS TestFlight beta, update to the latest version. If you’d like to join, use the public TestFlight link: Join the Bear: Markdown Notes beta - TestFlight - Apple
We’d love to hear how you use bearcli, the MCP server, and the Claude connector!
As with any beta software, we recommend backing up your notes before using it.
