YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Bear turns 10, and it still feels like day one

59 points psxuaw 2 hours ago 33 comments

expedited123 1 hour ago | parent

I thought this was about https://www.bearblog.dev/

ginko 1 hour ago | parent

I thought this was about a literal bear. Then again 10 years is not much of an age even for a wild bear.

brink 1 hour ago | parent

It just so happens I am looking for a solid knowledge management application. Too bad this is Apple-only.

I've gone from Obsidian, to LogSeq, to Org-mode on Emacs a few days ago, and I think I'm probably going to stay there.

I'm no expert on the subject, but I'm pretty sure Obsidian is winning not because it's great, but because it mostly doesn't suck, and it runs everywhere. I have little doubt that Bear is a better app than Obsidian.

dominotw 1 hour ago | parent

dont do any knowledge managment. you'll be fine.

Ezhik 1 hour ago | parent

nothing left to learn

it's all already known

thisIsFiner 15 minutes ago | parent

Unknown to the incurious public and unknown to humanity are two different things

"It" may not "all be known" but thanks to Einstein and other physicists we can be confident we're not going to find resolution to human biology's real problems circumlocuting entirely rhetorical political and economic theory shat out of academia the last 30 years of the 1900s, or same old religious allegory

Whole lot of information is 100% noise; as forgetable without issue as what you had for dinner on March 27, 2003; yeah you forget and don't track a lot of stuff that keeps you alive; I doubt sending an email on schedule matters much either. Just our contemporary social and communal role-play.

What's left to learn is pretty much moon shot physical experiment; generic office work 10s of millions are skilled in is not going to move the needle

NathanWilliams 48 minutes ago | parent

I have been using Bear daily for 7 years and it is indispensable for me.

Maybe you have perfect memory, but I have found it critical for my job.

d0liver 21 minutes ago | parent

Notes end up being process, too. It's basically a way of being intentional with how you apply your attention throughout changing mental contexts. I might have a really good idea today and then six months from now it's just totally off of my radar. Notes help with that context switching.

bananamogul 1 hour ago | parent

Joplin is another option, if you want a FOSS OneNote replacement

baran1 31 minutes ago | parent

hello org-mode friend! I've been on a similar journey and over the last month I've just been vibe building a replacement for logseq. So far: native macOS, high polish (I was a Bear user before logseq), and uses pi-durable so I can launch an agent from any line.

al_borland 30 minutes ago | parent

I tried using Bear many years ago. My issue with it was that while it was using markdown to format, everything is locked away in a SQLite DB, which kills a significant benefit of markdown notes.

I like Obsidian because it’s just stores a folder full of markdown files, and I can read/edit those files with whatever I want. It feels like a lot less lock-in than with Bear.

sandgiant 5 minutes ago | parent

Shiny Frog, the team behind Bear, have been working on a file backed notes app for years. Recently revived and rebranded from Panda to https://lettera.md.

t_mahmood 2 minutes ago | parent

I have built a lightweight, note taking application that focuses on quick note taking, and fully keyboard based usage. Notes are all one liner, and it supports minimum Markdown, you can manage tasks, reminders, do inline calculations, unlimited undo/redo. You can organize notes by project and categories.

https://mtarin.com/projects/nift/

Core point is simplicity, and frictionless note taking, and high performance, my dev version, can work with 12k notes without any issues.

Data is stored as text file.

Demo version is also available

I am looking for feedback, and wondering what would make people actually interested to buying this.

It's completely hand written, no AI assisted code.

iberator 1 hour ago | parent

Nowhere on the webpage i could find WHAT IS IT?

sanjit 1 hour ago | parent

Agreed! You’d have to navigate to the top level on the site…

“Bear is a beautiful, powerfully simple Markdown note taking app to capture, write, and organize your life.”

https://bear.app/

matteason 1 hour ago | parent

I thought it was pretty clear?

> Back in 2013, three friends who loved Apple and design couldn’t find a notes app they liked, so they built their own. That side project became Bear.

ballmerpoint 1 hour ago | parent

I’ve used Bear for years now and it’s great for writing notes and composing essays. I should probably subscribe to Bear Pro but they don’t have a lifetime option and I despise subscription models.

Luckily the paywall is mostly for export tools and cloud backup. The latter I don’t need, and it’s only a minor inconvenience to use Airdrop + pandoc for the former.

tptacek 1 hour ago | parent

I'm gradually replacing most of the software I use with software I conjure myself, and Bear is the reason I'm probably never going to write an editor; it's not clear to me how I could improve it. Emacs is probably out the door by the end of 2027, but I'd be surprised if I wasn't still using Bear for years from now. It's quite good.

brink 1 hour ago | parent

> I'm gradually replacing most of the software I use with software I conjure myself

Why?

tptacek 55 minutes ago | parent

I've written about this a bunch before and wasn't looking to take the thread off on a tangent; I'm really just saying how much I like Bear. Bear is great. I don't think I could come up with many ways to make it suit me better, which is not something I can say about a lot of other software.

Lord_Zero 31 minutes ago | parent

Why not? Its 2026 you can waive a hand and have bespoke opinionated FREE apps that do what you want and keep your data where you want.

Compare that to being forced to use someone else's highly opinionated software that might have paid pro features you need or don't need.

What a strange question to ask.

gffrd 25 minutes ago | parent

“why pay to go see a movie that someone else made, when I can see a movie I made for free?”

davidivadavid 10 minutes ago | parent

I'm not looking to be surprised by the tools I want to use for my specific purposes. Apples and oranges.

stevenhubertron 1 hour ago | parent

What am I missing about Bear? It looks like a close source Obsidian? What is hte magic that I am not seeing.

kstrauser 1 hour ago | parent

Obsidian is a closed source Obsidian.

I pay for Bear because it’s a native app and not in the weird uncanny valley of Electron apps that almost feel native until you hit the rough edges. It syncs with iCloud. It supports Shortcuts. It’s as responsive to keystrokes and keyboard shortcuts as any other Mac app. Basically, it just feels good to me and I enjoy using it.

Obsidian’s awesome. It’s also an ADHD tarpit for me. I can way too easily get distracted into optimizing my workflow instead of, you know, just typing notes into it. That’s a me problem, not a them problem. I don’t mean it as a criticism against Obsidian. It’s just not the right tool for me.

chrisfosterelli 1 hour ago | parent

I use both Bear and Obsidian. I do some long-form writing in Bear but keep all of my structured notes and markdown in Obsidian. Obsidian has much better tooling and many more features, but Bear has a very pleasant experience for writing. It's very simple but if it's all you need it's very polished.

If I had to choose one I'd use Obsidian because Bear's features are a subset of what Obsidian does, but Bear is still nice.

bherms 1 hour ago | parent

I've been using Bear for a long time. I tried Obsidian to move off Bear, but it didn't last long. The Bear UX is just great and that's what's kept me around this long.

SebastianKra 56 minutes ago | parent

Easily the best Markdown editor. I hate all rich-text editors except Bear.

Images appear as thumbnails in the notes-list.

Minimal tags-first organization, rather than Obsidians poorly thought out mix of files and tags.

...and that's it. It's the only app that has never given me any reason to switch in ~10 years.

kettlez 16 minutes ago | parent

Obsidian is not open source.

scosman 21 minutes ago | parent

Bear is such a delightful app. If anyone wants a fast, native notes app for Apple OSs, give it a try.

imbnwa 12 minutes ago | parent

Is this like a reminiscence, the devs are already building the replacement: https://lettera.md/

sandgiant 9 minutes ago | parent

Bear is such a fantastic app. They nailed the editor feel and function early on and then have consistently improved stability and performance ever since.

They worked on a file backed editor at some point called Panda, but decided to scrap it due to the trade offs of not controlling the storage format. Really respect the focus on their core USP.

Edit: Looks like Panda was recently revived under a new name and is currently in beta: https://lettera.md.

The support is super friendly and responsive and sync just works perfectly and consistently.

Their only response to the AI mania has been adding an official embedded cli to interact with the DB safely.

They are currently working on a web client. This has me slightly worried, but it's apparently been a recurring request for people forced to use Windows at work. I trust they know what they're doing.