A user on Reddit just posted that he’d developed an MCP that works with Claude Desktop against Bear Notes on MacOS. I’m playing around with it, but it’s absolutely fantastic.
The tools that the MCP makes available are as follows:
-
bear-open-note- Read full content of a specific note including text, formatting, and metadata -
bear-search-notes- Find notes by text content or tags, returns list with IDs for further actions -
bear-create-note- Create new notes with optional title, content, and tags -
bear-add-text-append- Add text to the end of existing notes or specific sections -
bear-add-text-prepend- Insert text at the beginning of existing notes or sections
In testing it, the limit for search is 50 items, but you can ask Claude to increase that and it will. You can also target requests against notes with specific tags, etc. Super simple to install and set up for those interested.
Note: The MCP allows editing and creating notes. I’d advise making backups before doing that and tell Claude NOT to update existing notes without getting your permission. From what I can tell, there’s no data transmitted outside of what’s sent to Anthropic via Claude itself, so privacy is as good as you get from Claude in the first place. FWIW, I have a toggle set to note use my data for training purposes (there’s an option under Privacy in User Settings).
I’ve similarly used tools like Ollama and MSTY Studio to locally run LLMs against exports of Bear data (which is much more private), but the Claude integration is definitely nice via the MCP. Allows you to build connections, assemble thoughts in new ways, build Claude Artifacts from your notes. Just nuts.
Here’s the Reddit post: Reddit - The heart of the internet