Yessir~
I’m going to try that, love Bear too much, haha.
I like your irony 
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Hello folks,
I want to add some considerations from our side.
TLDR: A calendar view is not planned and we think that it’s outside the Bear scope as an app (bonus: this is a very insightful thread on how a “small” feature might not be that small or simple)
@KillerWhale nailed a part of our philosophy in evaluating new features:
We’re trying to keep the data inside Bear as open and accessible as possible and we want Bear to be a tool in your toolbox, not THE tool that does everything.
At the current state of Bear exporting your notes, will only “lose” the tags metadata (pinned status and Tagcon) as they are specific to Bear. Other note apps are actively trying to lock you in, we’re trying to avoid that.
There are plenty more reasons: feature bloat, keeping the app “simple”, etc… But I’m sure you get the idea.
We have a vision for Bear and we’re trying to bend it to include suggestions that make sense for us, but we can’t add everything 
Bonus:
This feature request was discussed among a few users here and there wasn’t an agreement on whether it was worth adding and what it should do. Now imagine being us, having to do the same while trying to make something useful for hundred of thousands of users 
And this thread was only the pitch of a feature, for our team it would be something like:
- discuss the pitch and decide if it’s a fit for Bear (and believe me just having the team agree on this it’s HARD)
- discuss the UX and the details of the feature (multiple iterations)
- have our designers’ team design the UI (multiple iterations, macOS and iOS)
- (NEW) discuss the feature with our users on this forum to make it even better
- developers need to implement the feature/UI + automated testing
- localizing in 13 languages
- internal testing
- external testing
- making a new release (Apple review, release notes, etc…)
- writing public documentation (website, FAQ, etc…)
- promote the feature via social media
Make it two days per task (in a super optimistic estimate) and it’s already a month’s worth of work for a small feature. I’m just writing this because I know that’s very difficult to understand how much work there is behind Bear (and most apps really) and we’re trying to be as transparent as possible about our workflow.
As usual, thank you all for the time you’re spending with us, your feedback is invaluable (even when it triggers a semi-rant)
12 Likes
Thanks for sharing that with us, letting us know how you work in detail and what it represents on your end! For us lovers of the app it’s really great to have a little of the inside view and to be able to communicate with you guys in that open, detailed manner!
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Let me add some words to your statement from my perspective as user: there are apps which you use and there are apps which you love. Bear belongs to the latter group. The love is shown by trying to be a part of development and by respecting what you call the scope of an app. As a user I tend to be selfish: I also have a vision about what bear could be - for me! In the last year I made some requests which you refused an that led to disappointment on my side. To my surprise I learned to live with that and most what I considered enormously important turned out to be a narrow-minded idea. Nevertheless there are few point there I can remain obstinate. Whenever I think deeper about the implementation of a feature that seems to be simple I remark how many side-effects this feature has in relation to the rest of the app and how complex the development of an app could become already on that superficial level. Not to speak about the real development of which you gave an insight in your post. Let me express my respect for you, trix80 and the rest of your team for your hard work and loyalty to your own principles.
3 Likes
Just wanted to confirm that not getting this will not drive me into some kind of frothing-chthonian monster. <3
I respect a decision like this a lot, thank you for taking the time to explain and sticking to your principles. This can be hard in our modern era, but when you put your foot down, you do so, - and you did!
I understand that it wouldn’t be a small thing that the team could put together in a hackathon-weekend, that would have been unreasonable! Also thank you also to @KillerWhale and @krssno for being awesome on this.
My (perhaps unfortunate) need to see my timed notes in an easy way means that I am currently just running a background script to export, and then using a custom Obsidian view to browse things, with a handy little x-callback-url for me to happily come back to Bear to do my actual writing.
Lookin’ forward to more!
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Heartbreaking to read, but fair enough. I used to use Bear for everything before I tried Craft and found their Calendar feature absolutely invaluable for making notes that I’ll only ever need to see for a single day (such as saving a ticket for a future date, or writing out thoughts for a phone call. I probably make more daily notes than actual notes). Craft’s lack of security and weird corporate direction is hard to square with though, so occasionally I’ve been checking in on Bear and hoping to see this feature get added to the app I actually want to use. It’s time to give up hope of this ever being a thing 
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Hi, KillerWhale
How do you do that? How do you use tags to mimick the Calendar functionality and see notes added in a specific day?
Thanks
One way:
- Create a tag structure of:
#calendar/mm/dd#(Example)
Positives:
- Easy automation with Shortcuts
- Quick open, jump to date, works well (Example)
- Don’t like having just one daily note? Tag any note with this date structure and see all notes across your account on a specific day
Negatives:
- No true “calendar view”. It’s just a list of notes.
- In order to see the notes in a historical layout you have to modify the sorting to be by Title and reverse order (Z → A).
I’m sure there are other considerations here, but this seems to work well in my brain.
I’m just tagging year/month/day, nothing fancy
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Well, @cdate and @date will get you notes created/modified by day.
If your daily note titles are in ISO8601 format (e.g., YYYY-MM-DD), then you can search by year, month, and day with @title instead of tagging them by month and day. Personally, I tag my daily notes with the week number so I can do quick weekly reviews with a search for #log/2025/W08
@matteo just double checking - is there any way this feature will ever be considered, if there’s enough interest from users?
I can see the challenges here, but I equally see how a ‘chronological view’ would be essential for some people. And perhaps because I work in product myself I have an idea of how it could be implemented without creeping up the scope / feature bloat that the team is rightfully concerned about.
I was the one who started this thread. In the course of the discussion I withdrew my request. The calendar view is already available. It’s just not in the form that we are used to see in some other apps. I can’t say why the display using a tag tree shouldn’t be sufficient. Actually a calendar view is just about being visually pleasant, isn‘t it?
Thanks for the reply @krssno ! Just for me to understand - by ‘the calendar view is already available’ you mean - by appending tags in a tag tree format? If that is the case and I’ve understood correctly - I’m afraid that feels like a workaround to me, which unfortunately doesn’t work for me. It requires a fair amount of ongoing maintenance (whether the workaround is to apply ‘current day’ tag, or to append a ‘current day’ snippet to the title of each note I create).
I assume my ideal scenario would be to be able to see all the notes created on ‘date x’ natively;
for instance Jan 19 > Note 1; Note 2. Jan 20 > no notes. Jan 21 > Note 1 - simply relying on the ‘created date’ metadata.
Whether that’d be in a ‘long list’ format, or a ‘calendar view’ format - I wouldn’t necessarily have preferences. I hope that clarifies my thinking!
You could use Shortcuts to create new notes tagged with the current date. My daily notes are all created via Shortcuts and they are automatically tagged as #YYYY-MM-DD, so I do get that “calendar” overview for them.
I was someone who missed having the calendar widget that linked to my daily notes in Obsidian. So I created a shortcut that I set to run every day at Sunrise that takes that day’s daily note and puts to the link to it in an all-day calendar appointment!
I prefer to create my daily notes ahead of time so that I can drop in links to meetings for that day, but this shortcut could also be modified to create a daily note at the same time. My daily notes are all formatted using the YYYY-MM-DD title format.
I like this shortcut because I already live inside Apple Calendar, so it gives me an easy way to access my daily notes.
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Yes! I use Agenda for calendar management, and my daily note shortcut creates a link to my Today view and another to my On The Agenda view. It’s super convenient.
Yeah, since implementing this I have used it way more than anticipated. Just an easy point of access for the day’s note. I also have a shortcut on my home screen that takes me directly to today’s daily note, which has also been very helpful.
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This is a creative solution! I’m going to try it with a separate calendar, that will be just for this
Maybe someone will find this useful. I created a small swift helper designed to work with apps like Alfred, Keyboard Maestro etc. to quickly switch to next/previous daily note in Bear with a keyboard shortcut. This won’t create new notes if they don’t exist, but navigate to the closest existing one, mimicking Obsidian’s native Open previous/next daily note command. Currently only works with YYYY-MM-DD titles, but you can modify source if you want.
The reason I created this is because I couldn’t find a better way to get the current note’s ID from Bear without a) obliterating the clipboard by copying Note Identifier via AppleScript or b) significantly impact performance. Commands execute in ~150 ms, making it feel decently fast.
If anyone prefers the AppleScript route, here’s what I used:
Previous note:
tell application "Bear" to activate
tell application "System Events"
tell process "Bear"
click menu item "Copy Identifier" of menu "Note" of menu bar 1
end tell
end tell
set noteID to the clipboard
set dbPath to (POSIX path of (path to home folder)) & "Library/Group Containers/9K33E3U3T4.net.shinyfrog.bear/Application Data/database.sqlite"
set q to "SELECT ZTITLE FROM ZSFNOTE WHERE ZTITLE < (SELECT ZTITLE FROM ZSFNOTE WHERE ZUNIQUEIDENTIFIER = '" & noteID & "') AND ZTITLE GLOB '[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]' AND ZTRASHED = 0 ORDER BY ZTITLE DESC LIMIT 1"
set targetDate to do shell script "sqlite3 " & quoted form of dbPath & " " & quoted form of q
if targetDate is "" then
display notification "No previous daily note found"
return
end if
open location "bear://x-callback-url/open-note?title=" & targetDate
Next note:
tell application "Bear" to activate
tell application "System Events"
tell process "Bear"
click menu item "Copy Identifier" of menu "Note" of menu bar 1
end tell
end tell
set noteID to the clipboard
set dbPath to (POSIX path of (path to home folder)) & "Library/Group Containers/9K33E3U3T4.net.shinyfrog.bear/Application Data/database.sqlite"
set q to "SELECT ZTITLE FROM ZSFNOTE WHERE ZTITLE > (SELECT ZTITLE FROM ZSFNOTE WHERE ZUNIQUEIDENTIFIER = '" & noteID & "') AND ZTITLE GLOB '[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]' AND ZTRASHED = 0 ORDER BY ZTITLE ASC LIMIT 1"
set targetDate to do shell script "sqlite3 " & quoted form of dbPath & " " & quoted form of q
if targetDate is "" then
display notification "No next daily note found"
return
end if
open location "bear://x-callback-url/open-note?title=" & targetDate