I’ve been using bear for almost a year I guess and absolutely love it, tried a lot of other note-taking apps, but I just love bear with it’s simplicity.
I’m curious - how many notes do you all have in Bear? I’d love to hear about your setup and how you keep everything organized.
A few things I’m wondering:
How many notes are in your library?
What’s your tag system like? Do you use nested tags, keep it flat, or something in between?
What do you mainly use Bear for? (journaling, work notes, writing projects, recipes, everything?)
Any organization tips you’ve picked up along the way?
Always fun to see how others use the same app so differently. Looking forward to learning from you all!
llms — everything related to LLMs (with sub-tags for different topics). I’m an AI engineer so this one gets a lot of use.
personal — all my personal notes
projects — project-related stuff
readwise — I read a lot of articles and RSS feeds, and I highlight the interesting bits (mostly technical content) using Readwise Reader. I import all those highlights into Bear — not really for organization, just for searchability. I wrote a custom Python script that uses the Readwise API to fetch my latest highlights, creates a TextBundle, and imports it into Bear. It’s triggered by a Shortcut, so syncing is just one tap.
sources — notes on courses, books, and research papers
swe — software engineering notes (stuff not directly related to AI/LLMs)
writing — for drafting blog posts (though recently I’ve moved most of my writing to local markdown files as it’s just easier to edit and do custom stuff with Claude Code. I use Typora for that now).
@PeterT wow, and I was worried about my ~2k notes and ~3GB of space
Also, +1 on workspaces.
Here is my PARA-ish setup (tags are in Italian, English explanation below). I use Bear for almost everything, it’s my second brain and the app I keep open all day. I use Things 3 for tasks and reminders and Bear to remember and organize information.
Thanks for sharing your setup, awesome. Do you organize the study notes or learning notes also by topics ? Or just have one tag to house all of the notes ? I am always confused between whether to organize by topic or not since my learning (mostly AI) is so overlapping between different topics that a note almost contains 3-4 topics lol.
Hi Alex, I can share the readwise automated import shortcut but mind you that it’s very much opinionated and written in python. I am not sure if many people are technical here to get it to work. Nonetheless, I will share it when I get back tomorrow, of course you can take help of chatgpt/claude to modify the code to do the stuff to your liking. But for me it work flawlessly. I kinda built my own readwise sync feature haha because I just can’t go to other note taking app once I’ve used bear.
Yes, I do organize by topics, but I’m facing the same problems as you. I think it’s almost inevitable. When I have some spare time, I try to reorganize my notes and merge tags that only have 2 or 4 notes into broader categories.
But the truth is that I use the search function 99% of the time when I want to find a note, so a bit of mess with non top level tags is not a big problem.
If I’m actively researching a topic, I eventually create another tag under “in progress” or a tag in the tag cloud so I can keep easy access to those notes but, overall, I strongly believe that overorganizing is worse than not organizing at all.
I wouldn’t aim for perfection, just try to take a little time every week to review and tidy things up.
I use the search function 99% of the time when I want to find a note
I too almost always use search, I just love bear search with it’s OCR capabilites. It’s so fast.
If I’m actively researching a topic, I eventually create another tag under “in progress” or a tag in the tag cloud so I can keep easy access to those notes but, overall, I strongly believe that overorganizing is worse than not organizing at all.
I do this too , but always have to convince myself that not micro-organizing is fine (hard to leave old habits, but I’ve come to the same conclusion).
Assuming that most of the 131gb comes from attachments, one more reason why (I think) Bear should really provide a better way to search, access and manage them
This description of workspaces and how they would function is very good, imo.
I especially like the idea that you could choose which workspace to sync/download to your devices on the go (thereby reducing overall space needs and considerably speeding up download time as well as uploads); the ability to select which notes/folders/workspaces/tags/etc. to download is a feature I have wanted in many, many note apps – but alas – never get. Said behavior would also improve privacy by eliminating the chance that private files are even on-device, for what it’s worth.
