The Apple Notes’ Export as Markdown then Bear’s Import From Markdown Folder process is so close… However, and this is a big however, it loses links between Notes. I would love to see a native, purpose-built, “Import from Apple Notes” feature which can do pretty much everything the Markdown Export+Import process does, but add in preserving cross-Notes Links.
This would need to account for the two different ways that links to other Notes can be saved: the text link that goes to a note (this link is preserved in the Markdown export), and a Notes Object Link which only exports as a plain string of text (the version of a link that has the little Note icon in front of it, created when you use the >>Note Title shortcut, or the option to “Use Note Title” when using the “Add Link” function).
A native importer would be even better if different highlight colors were preserved (e.g. if the highlight was pink in Apple Notes, preserve it as red, not default green, highlight in Bear). Doing a copy & paste of highlighted text from Apple Notes to Bear preserves highlight colors, so having highlight colors saved during an Import would be amazing.
If we could address these two things, it makes fully migrating from Apple Notes to Bear practically a no-brainer. As it stands now, I’m stuck in two worlds… I’ve got too much stuck in Apple Notes that is cross-linked between each other it becomes very tedious to migrate and re-link one-by-one. So I’m trying to move into Bear and create my new notes in Bear, but if I need to link back to other Apple Notes, I bail out and create it in Apple Notes instead so I can do the cross-note linking.
The last thing, I’m not sure if my usage would be an edge case or if others have done this too… Apple Notes text highlighting is relatively new. Before they offered it, I would “highlight” by using colored text (e.g. change the font color from black to blue). I know Markdown doesn’t have font coloring, but if font color could perhaps be transformed into highlights and then preserved using highlights, that would be amazing.
The legacy Automator Workflow dropping non-image attachments and checklists are non-starters for using the legacy Automator Workflow. My Apple Notes are chock full of tasks lists and PDFs. Markdown Export+Import preserves those, but loses Notes Links.