Less Fuss, More Notes—Back to Bear

👋 It's been a while.

Catch Up

The last year has been a chaotic, tumultuous mess. From being laid off to going zero-to-hero with SwiftUI and building a fully featured app, to having that app featured on the App Store, to landing a new job in cybersecurity, to finally taking some well-deserved vacation time in April—I’ll be in Japan for a month.

With the additional free time, I now have the opportunity to be more active here, and I’m excited to get back to writing. While a lot has changed, a lot has stayed the same. Surprising no one, I’ve been trying out a few other PKMS apps—Anytype and Capacities, to name a few. Some felt clunky, some were too convoluted for my taste, so I ultimately went searching for something a bit more opinionated, a bit simpler—and landed back on an old favorite: Bear. Let me explain why.

I’ve talked about this in the past, but having too much flexibility to change the look and feel of an app absolutely kills my productivity—it’s almost impossible for me to be satisfied, and "comparison is the thief of joy." You can’t change much in Bear, though they recently added some new themes. But that’s it—just themes—and it doesn’t go beyond that. The only thing you can really adjust is how you organize your notes, and even then, you're quite restricted. This won’t resonate with everyone, but the method that I'm about to describe is good enough for me, and I’ve been using it continuously since starting my new role.