Earlier this year I said I was going to use Obsidian for all of 2023.

Well… I didn’t.

While I use Obsidian at work (mostly because of not having access to the App Store), I could get around how janky Obsidian is. It’s VSCode for writing, which is as distasteful as that sounds.

I have since then more or less stayed in Bear, with some daily logging in Day One. Today, Bear 2.0 released, with pretty much all of the features I wanted from Obsidian, but with a nice, native UI, and native speed, and mobile and watch apps that are… native. I think you see where this is going.

The big features they added that I adore:

• Tables, which seems minor if you’ve used, say, Apple Notes, but requires some real thinking for Markdown apps, which they’ve done.
• Link previews! Paste in a link and you can get a little link card. Small but lots of other notes apps do this and it makes contextualizing links a lot easier.
• Backlinks. All notes apps that support inter-note linking should have this. They don’t need the THOUGHT CLOUD or whatever that Obsidian has, just simple links back thanks.
• TOC and header folding. I like creating one long note for a topic that points to other notes that might go in to more detail, and the TOC and folding features make that a lot easier.

There are other odds and ends that would make me adore it even more (typewriter mode!), but hopefully all of the changes that went into Bear 2 means it will be easier to make further changes going forward.