I’m currently trying Bear and I may be missing something, but is it possible to create separate notebooks within Bear?
At present it looks like a big bucket with tags taking the place of separate project oriented notebooks in the style of Evernote.
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I’ve just seen this thread on creating workspaces. Given this has been discussed for some years with still no implementation of workspaces/separate notebooks, I guess the answer is no. The devs see tags as the answer.
Sooo, I guess Bear is not for me 
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In my memory the devs never said no to workspaces.
Please @trix180 give your opinion about workspaces.
We are not contrary to notebooks as long as they don’t make the UI more complex for the current usage. We have a few ideas about how to achieve this, but we are invested in other projects, and I can’t tell when we’ll really explore the Notebooks UI wise.
@PeterT: thank you for the reply. To be perfectly fair you’re right I don’t recall seeing anythng that said the Devs were against this. However given the length of time (= years) since the OP suggested some form of Workspace solution, nothing appears to have happened. Therefore I think it unlikely anythng such as this will be implemented any time soon if at all.
@trix180: I appreciate that if you are invested in tags as the default method of sorting notes then creating notebooks could be problematic. One way might be to create an invisible tag such that notes created in Book X would automatically carry the invisible tag “NBX” or whatever. Don’t know since I’m not a dev.
One thing I must applaud is that Bear is a Mac app and not some lowest common denominator cross platform app using Electron frameworks. Joplin ( https://joplinapp.org ) has the potential to be a good replacement for Evernote but it is based on Electron frameworks. This shows up in some of the UI stuff which doesn’t follow MacOS guidelines. If like me you’re working across several apps all of which do follow the guidelines, this becomes very irritating
“Big bucket of notes with tags” is one of the things that make Bear great, IMO! Not every app can be suitable for every use case.
Each to his own. My workflow uses separate notebooks for major projects with tags as identifiers according to to the note type/content. I also have more general notebooks with sub books according to project. It’s a system I’ve used for several years so I’m reluctant to abandon it in favour of somehting else.
@Honeybear88 I really like your description “Big bucket of notes with tags” - it’s very apt. I do so wish we could have separate buckets (workspaces/folders/whatever), but then it makes me wonder how the tags would work. Would each bucket have its own set of tags or would there be a system-wide set of tags? Or both? And how would searching/indexing the tags work (would you have to open each workspace before you could search tags, or could you search any tag from anywhere)? Could you or would you want to tag other notes in other buckets? How would all this work in coding?
Just thoughts in case trix180 is looking.
It seems as though users have two different concepts in mind here: notebooks (Evernote, OneNote or UpNote) and workspaces (Obsidian or Craft). Since I want workspaces, I want each workspace to function as a completely new and separate entity, totally independent of each other.
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Just a suggestion - I’m not a programmer but I think this might work…..
Create (say) 3 Notebooks, A. B and C. Each notebook is assigned an invisible tag: Notebook A gets 123, Notebook B gets 456 etc…. A new note in notebook A gets the invisible tag 123 and so on. You then apply your appropriate individual tag, Home, Work, Medical whatever.
Search possibilities. “Search All” ignores the invisble tag but searches on Home, Work etc. Selecting the individual note the tag then takes you to the appropriate notebook.
“Search in Notebook A” searches first on the invisible tag and then on whatever - Home, work etc. Again the invisible tag locates the note in the appropriate notebook.
If you retain the ‘big bucket’ then invisble tags don’t apply and you carry on as per.
Your individual tags, work, home etc would apply across all notebooks. The invisible tag is simply to tie the note to a particular notebook. Move the note and Bear deletes the tag and applies the new one appropriate to the new notebook.
Not given this a lot of thought but something along those lines could work.
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I appreciate there are different concepts. My usage goes back to various other notebooks on the Mac. Circusponies, Alfons Schmidt’s Notebooks and probably others at some stage. I’ve got so used to that format that I’m probably too old to change
At present I’m using Evernote but their prices are getting ridiculous for my use case, hence my trying Bear and others such as Joplin. The latter is more Evernote like. It is cross platform and shows undoubted promise, but there is no move towards Mac UI guidelines, something which I find irritating.
I feel like there’s some basic Bear functionality that isn’t being brought to … bear in this conversation.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your use case, but I maintain separate notebooks in Bear all the time using nested tags (though you wouldn’t even have to do that).
Let’s say you wanted two notebooks. Tag your first notes for each notebook lilke so:
- #notebooks/project a#
- #notebooks/project b#
When you navigate into that tag in the sidebar, which filters your note list down to any notes in that “notebook,” any new note you create will carry that tag.
Let’s say then that you want to distinguish different types of note by format. In Project A, you have a meeting and you have a contact. So your tags for each would be:
#notebooks/project a# #types/people
#notebooks/project a# #types/meetings
If you want to find all meetings in the Project A notebook, you navigate into that notebook in the sidebar, then search #types/meetings. The result will be all your meeting notes for Project A.
Yes, Bear is a big bucket of tags. But it’s pretty near infinitely customizable to slice, dice, and cross-reference according to whatever mental model or metaphor makes the most sense to you.
It sounds as though you have the use case more or less correct.
What you are suggesting sounds similar to my ideas but done with the existing tags.
Having used it for some years I’m so used to the separate notebooks system, it’s not letting me see clearly how I could use Bear’s tag system to achieve the same thing. What you suggest does work on a simple system so I’ll scale it up and see how I get on.
Many thanks for the suggestion,
@MarcusW Your solution doesn’t solve the problem of having bussiness, private and secret notes in the same database.
That’s only possible with notebooks or workspaces with separate databases.
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That’s what I meant by saying that notebooks and workspaces are not the same thing but sometimes people say notebooks but actually mean workspaces. The latter ones are totally separated places.