Feature request - Daily Notes

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1

I know Bear is not trying to be a Roam or Obsidian. But even Craft has Daily Notes by now. When you get used to them, you see a whole new way to organize your work and take notes. I’ve subscribed to Bear again, and I’ve been creating a new note every day with the title YYYY-MM-DD. It’s not ideal at all. A feature would be much better.

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I definitely know what you mean :wink:
I imagine something beautiful and useful like a monthly calendar in the middle pane of bear where otherwise the list of notes are displayed. And maybe a list of notes belonging to the calendar

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I run a script (with a hot key using FastScripts) that copies the date in #date/YYYY/MM/DD format into my note, and use that for everything I type into Bear. It’s easy to do now I suspect with Shortcuts, but I implemented it with AppleScript on macOS. Also the Shortcut keyboard on iOS will also do it. This doesn’t create a calendar in the second column, but organizes the tag in such a way that it works similarly. (My script also shifts to just inserting YYYY-MM-DD if Bear is not frontmost, which is very handy—I use it to name the beginning of almost all my files so they sort by date automatically.).

tell application "System Events"
	set gActiveApp to name of first application process whose frontmost is true
	if gActiveApp is "Bear" then
		set date_ to (do shell script "date +#date/%Y/%m/%d") & " "
	else
		set date_ to (do shell script "date +%Y-%m-%d") & " "
	end if
	
	keystroke date_
end tell
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4

Thank you! I don’t know if I’m able to run an Apple Script (never tried before), but I appreciate that you share it.

5

Daily notes would be great

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I personally does not use this feature at all and hope Bear stays as it is. It is a nifty feature where only the people who uses use and those who don’t use have an unnecessary tab all the time.

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7

You can easily create that feature via Apple Shortcuts.

Format date and create a Bear note with that title.

EDIT: in fact, I made a shortcut like that just right now. Let me know if the link works, never tried sharing shortcuts with others before: Shortcuts

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8

Actually the power of daily notes lies in the backlinks in the daily notes and in the ability to filter the backlinks of notes that are linked in daily notes. That is the approach of roam reseach for example or other similar tools. That goes beyond the scope of bear. As far as i can see you all are not asking for daily notes as feature in a narrow sense but for a more convenient way to tag special notes with the current date?

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It could be irrelevant, but you can create notes by default with Date and Time as first header (Prefs > General)…

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Indeed, Craft has daily notes, but in my opinion, that was the beginning of them losing their identity, as now evidenced by many disgruntled comments on their Slack.
I have never understood the appeal of that feature, and I don’t see a case for it in Bear beyond having the possibility - already present - to create new notes with todays date and/or build shortcuts that replicate that.

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That feature indeed has only appeal in the context of roam research and other apps of that kind. There it is the central place of the app. Out of curiosity: what are the complaints in crafts slack?

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Two aspects mainly:

  • That features promised for years have never been delivered (tags) and areas of the app that were promised to improve (knowledge management) have largely been untouched to chase more « buzzword » features
  • That many users don’t understand what the app is trying to be anymore and are starting to wonder if they can trust it
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