I have been experiencing terrible lag (in the order of 5 seconds) when switching to Bear on macOS and finally figured out today that the problem was my Avast Business AntiVirus File Shield. I’m not sure whether Bear’s behaviour changed or Avast’s did, because I’ve had both for quite a while and it’s only become a problem in the last year or so, but it’s been literally maddening sometimes.
While I haven’t found any other references to this issue on the forum, I thought I would share the solution in case someone else has an issue with Avast or another AV program.
Fortunately, File Shield allows for exceptions to the rules and the following directories need to be configured as exceptions:
- /Users//Library/Containers/net.shinyfrog.bear/Data
- /Users//Library/Group Containers/9K33E3U3T4.net.shinyfrog
- /Users//Library/Group Containers/9K33E3U3T4.net.shinyfrog.bear
- /private/var/folders/fb/y4tgp5nx1qd5dzxm8k3f1xmr0000gn/C/net.shinyfrog.bear
The first three are relative to the user’s home directory (replace with your macOS username).
In the case of Avast, where it presents a file picker dialog for exceptions, the net.shinyfrog.bear directory is hidden from the picker once you get to the Containers subdirectory. Fortunately you can paste the full path blindly into the picker and it will go to the folder even though you can’t navigate there with a mouse.
The last folder is almost certainly different from system to system, but my folder was created in 2022, so at least it appears to be persistent once created. You can find the folder on your system by opening Activity Monitor when Bear is running, double-clicking Bear, selecting “Open Files and Ports”, and searching for “/private/var/folders”. Note that there are probably some other folders in this tree; you want to add the exception for the net.shinyfrog.bear folder.
Hope this helps someone before they get as frustrated as I was.