Bear Notes

Bear Notes

Use grizzly to create, read, and manage notes in Bear on macOS.

Routing

• ❌ Don't use for quick system capture (prefer apple-notes).
• ❌ Don't use for plain markdown files / linked-note workflows (prefer obsidian).
• ❌ Don't use for collaborative docs/databases (prefer notion).

Requirements

• Bear app installed and running
• For some operations (add-text, tags, open-note --selected), a Bear app token (stored in ~/.config/grizzly/token)

Getting a Bear Token

For operations that require a token (add-text, tags, open-note --selected), you need an authentication token:

1. Open Bear → Help → API Token → Copy Token
2. Save it: echo "YOUR_TOKEN" > ~/.config/grizzly/token

Common Commands

Create a note

echo "Note content here" | grizzly create --title "My Note" --tag work
grizzly create --title "Quick Note" --tag inbox < /dev/null

Open/read a note by ID

grizzly open-note --id "NOTE_ID" --enable-callback --json

Append text to a note

echo "Additional content" | grizzly add-text --id "NOTE_ID" --mode append --token-file ~/.config/grizzly/token

List all tags

grizzly tags --enable-callback --json --token-file ~/.config/grizzly/token

Search notes (via open-tag)

grizzly open-tag --name "work" --enable-callback --json

Options

Common flags:

• --dry-run — Preview the URL without executing
• --print-url — Show the x-callback-url
• --enable-callback — Wait for Bear's response (needed for reading data)
• --json — Output as JSON (when using callbacks)
• --token-file PATH — Path to Bear API token file

Configuration

Grizzly reads config from (in priority order):

1. CLI flags
2. Environment variables (GRIZZLY_TOKEN_FILE, GRIZZLY_CALLBACK_URL, GRIZZLY_TIMEOUT)
3. .grizzly.toml in current directory
4. ~/.config/grizzly/config.toml

Example ~/.config/grizzly/config.toml:

token_file = "~/.config/grizzly/token"
callback_url = "http://127.0.0.1:42123/success"
timeout = "5s"

Notes

• Bear must be running for commands to work
• Note IDs are Bear's internal identifiers (visible in note info or via callbacks)
• Use --enable-callback when you need to read data back from Bear
• Some operations require a valid token (add-text, tags, open-note --selected)