Bear Notes MCP for Claude Desktop

General
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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

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Apple Intelligence and AI in general
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Yep. I also coded (with help from Claude Code of course) an MCP that goes right to the database. It’s dangerous to side-step the API (backup first!) but also faster and uses bulk operations:

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Holy smokes that’s awesome!

Will definitely be giving this a whirl. Do you run this on the actual DB yourself, or off of backup copies? Am curious… I’ll definitely give this a whirl off of a copy of the SQLite db.

If you haven’t already done so, I recommend posting to the Bear Notes subreddit too — there’s already a thread from the developer of the Claude Code MCP extension. You guys might like to connect. I’ve already asked him to create an npm version of his MCP so it can work directly with Claude Code as well as the Claude Desktop version.

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Actually, it looks like your link doesn’t work — is that project still available in any form?

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After it corrupted my database (easy to restore, though I had to delete the iCloud sync copy too) I figured I’d spare others the same grief.

I am starting over, but with backup files instead.

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Oh interesting!

Any differences in capabilities available working against backups versus a SQLite DB?

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I just don’t like the API for automated actions. It is unpredictable when things get complicated and it can’t handle bulk operations.

So exporting and importing backups seems like a better way to go IMHO. So far not much functionality, but I’ll add things as I go.

At present I have fifteen teenagers in my house making lots of New Year’s commotion, so no coding gonna happen until 2026 :slight_smile:

Happy new year!

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