• Notes are plain text-based. You don’t need your mouse to write and there’s a ton of convenient shortcuts to navigate and organize with the keyboard alone.

• Nested Tags is a killer feature: it borrows the good things from both worlds of Folders and Tags. You can nest tags to create hierarchy, while each note can belong to more than one tag.

• I especially like how they show notes tagged with children tags, even when you are highlighting the parent tag. I.e. I see all the notes about SwiftUI, ARKit and Core Data when viewing the “Swift” tag, but I can zoom in to one of the specific topics. If I’m seeing my receipts, I can zoom in to a certain year.

• I’m hoping to migrate Day One journals here eventually. Having journals that are tagged to #journal/2019/11/02 and to #journal/travel a lot better than what Day One has to offer.

My Bear setup: quite a work in progress.

• I wish there were encryption for notes with attachments. Currently I’m not quite comfortable archiving all my tax forms and ID in there.

• Sync is fast. Like, blazing fast. Makes you wonder how Bear does it 100x better than Apple’s Notes app when they are literally both using the same CloudKit infrastructure (and to think that CloudKit is Apple’s own).