I passed my third anniversary of giving up alcohol today. I thought I would share some background on this milestone and why I decided to stop drinking.
I have a long history with alcohol. Maybe it’s the genetics mapped deep in my Irish blood or an inheritance from longstanding tradition, but alcoholism runs in the family, near and far. I can’t think of a time in my life that wasn’t steeped in the rituals of drinking.
I met the love of my life in a dive bar. Most of my proudest accomplishments and favorite moments were punctuated with a celebration beer or glass of wine. An early love of Hemingway surely contributed to an interweaving of my very identity with alcohol. If I closed my eyes and pictured my true self in my natural element, it was cozied up to a dimly lit bar with a whiskey on the rocks in a brown, brown study.
I was never what you’d call a problem drinker. I never hit that proverbial rock bottom. But I saw in myself the potential to become one. Retiring early brings many joys, but it also provides the means and opportunity to easily tip over into alcoholism. I left my profession for a pirate’s life of boats and docks and drinking buddies, which, in hindsight, feels like a trifecta of trouble for the would-be alcoholic. I think many people enjoy time on the water as an excuse to drink with friends. I know I surely did.
Over a stretch of twenty-five years, I gave up drinking an astonishing twenty-two times. I know this because of an obsessive need to keep track of my life through a daily journal.
When I gave up alcohol on this day three years ago, I looked through these old journals for clues. I analyzed the data and found troubling patterns — empirical evidence my logical, fact-based mind could not refute.
I discovered that most attempts lasted a week or less. On four occasions, I managed more than a month without drinking—the longest, six months. I often complained of headaches and insomnia in the first few days. After two weeks, I slept better and had more energy. On longer stretches of sobriety, I lost weight, my blood pressure improved, and I felt more optimistic.
I asked myself, as I flipped through those scribbled snapshots of my past, why in the world did I ever start drinking again?
Here’s what happened, time after time after time: I enjoyed such a rebound in health and outlook that I considered myself “cured.” There’s a name for this in sobriety literature: the Pink Cloud. Feeling so good, I couldn’t possibly be addicted to alcohol any longer, so I concluded it was perfectly fine to drink again, just in moderation like everyone else. After all, who would want to quit the stuff forever?
As you might have guessed, the dabbling soon turned to the occasional few too many until I eventually returned to my old ways. I gained weight, slept poorly, and fibbed about my alcohol consumption on medical questionnaires.
It took reading this boom-and-bust history in my own words, repeated and repeated and repeated, to fully comprehend the situation. Self-knowledge is a real-life superpower. My journals delivered a message that I could not have accepted so completely any other way.
For most people, controlling alcohol consumption is natural and easy. For others, it’s more complicated. My journals taught me the hard truth that I’m one of those rare cases where moderation simply doesn’t work.
I was still hoping for a third door: another option besides door number one (drinking) and door number two (sobriety). I simply could not fathom that there wasn’t a fucking third door.
— We Are the Luckiest by Laura Mckowen
The thing is, I now know remaining a non-drinker is essential to my health and happiness. At 59, I’m back to my college weight and waist size. I have more energy than I had at 49 and sometimes even 39. I feel very comfortable in my own skin.
Yet my journals have ground into me an inescapable truth: I am not cured. I cannot dabble. I cannot drink even one single beer. I must remain vigilant, which, even after three years, isn’t always easy.
After all, there is a lot of encouragement in our society to drink alcohol. Drinking, plans for drinking, casual references to drinking, jokes about drinking, memes about drinking, and advertisements for drinking are everywhere. Being a non-drinker, at least in my experience, runs against the very grain of societal norms. Alcohol, which is responsible for more deaths each year than cocaine, heroin, and meth combined, is the only drug you have to explain not using.
We sold the boat last year and now live in a 55+ retirement community in Arizona. We’ve made dear, dear friends, all of whom drink. Like boaters, young retirees do like to tip back a pint or two. Sometimes, it feels like we’re all back at college, only this time with nice houses and money. I pack along a little cooler of non-alcoholic beer to parties, though you’ll see me slip away early. A room is never drunker than when you’re the only sober person.
I’ve never gone to an AA meeting, though sometimes I think it would be nice to have even one sober friend who understands my reluctance to hang out when alcohol is flowing so freely. I’m not the most social person, so introducing one more mental barrier to attending these get-togethers isn’t helpful.
A few months back, I smoked some pot at one of these parties to try to enjoy myself more. The last time must have been thirty years ago. As it hit me, I felt that familiar glossy curtain sway between me and my surroundings, that muting of the sharp and bright realities of life. With alcohol, I enjoyed that pleasant release. But, as I sat there with my lungs burning and my mind not entirely my own, I felt uneasy and, well, drugged.
With addiction, there’s always something deeper that keeps you drinking from the poisoned well. The legendary Joe Louis once said of a wily opponent, “he can run, but he can’t hide.” It can be difficult to look too closely at the harder parts of life, the miseries so interlinked with the joys, the seeming pointlessness and terrors of existence. Alcohol hides all that away for a time, but it’s a cop-out. These are the things we all need to face. We can’t run. We can’t hide.
No matter how fast I run, I can never seem to get away from me.
— Your Bright Baby Blues by Jackson Browne
When my son was killed in a motorcycle accident almost two years ago, I was desperate for anything that could soften the pain I felt. If I were still drinking, it would have been an easy thing to drown myself in alcohol. Maybe it’s a small blessing that I had a year of sobriety to weather that awful storm. But, if anything, my resolve now is stronger. Connor told me in the last year of his life that he was proud of me for not drinking. My eyes well up with tears as I remember this. How could I even think of tarnishing that memory?
Lisa, the same love of my life this young accountant met playing pool in a bar so long ago, who’s stuck with me for twenty-eight years and drinks so sporadically that I hardly even notice, has been a huge supporter of my sobriety. The following morning, she asked me what I thought of smoking pot. She was a little worried it might have triggered something and cause me to fall off the wagon.
“I didn’t like it. It felt a little too much like being buzzed from alcohol,” I said over coffee. “It feels weird to say it, but I just like being me.”
This is the second of what might become a series of posts about how I use the Bear app to improve how I leverage notes in my reading and thinking. This is not a topic that will interest many, but writing a blog offers its indulgences. Unless your interests lie in the nerdier aspects of note-taking systems, you can safely skip this one.
If you told me a year ago that I’d write a blog post about the power of Apple widgets, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here I am—writing a blog post about Apple widgets.
You might be asking, what are you even talking about? What are widgets? Apple introduced these quirky appendages in 2020 as a way to present information from apps on the home screen of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The most popular widgets provide information about weather, stocks, and news. My reaction back then was decidedly ho-hum. Why would I want to clutter the precious real estate of my iPhone screen when I could just open the app?
A particular kind of widget in Bear 2 finally convinced me of their value.
In January, I switched from Craft to Bear 2 for my reading and knowledge notes. I shared why I chose Bear in this post. The switch went so well that I soon brought over my journal from Day One and my writing from Ulysses. For the past four months, almost everything I’ve written has started and ended in Bear.
I knew that Bear’s implementation of widgets was top-notch. Widgets are an afterthought in Craft, and Obsidian doesn’t offer them at all. What I didn’t understand was that a widget exists in Bear that does something you can’t even do in the app itself: the random note widget.
Before I dive into how important the random widget has become in my notes system, let me explain the problem it solves.
The Compounding Value of Review
When I first created my connected notes system, I clarified three vital parts of the process: capturing notes and quotes from my reading; curating what I’ve gathered into the system; and compounding the knowledge and insights I’ve gleaned with regular review.
I’ve earned high marks on capture and curation. I’ve had no problem marking passages I like on my Kindle in this digital age. My physical books are filled with margin notes. And I’ve done pretty well organizing all those notes and quotes into stand-alone documents for each book I’ve read. In the Zettelkasten way, I’ve written hundreds of “permanent notes,” which are ideas or knowledge areas I’ve encountered across my reading, linked and cross-linked with other related ideas and books.
But the compounding part of the system, which consists of reviewing my notes and looking for connections and insights I might have missed — arguably the most crucial phase — had lagged. I was reminded of this when I imported my notes from Craft to Bear. I needed to correct some formatting issues, which required inspecting each note individually. There were many notes — far too many — that I hadn’t touched since writing them. What’s the point of taking notes in the first place if you don’t review them?
If you just put notes in all the time and never review them, you’ll have a lot of garbage and hidden notes. You’ll look at your software and realize you don’t use it and abandon it.
— Curtis McHale, PKM in Retrospect
An inspiration for a better review process came from my years of using ReadWise. For almost 1,000 mornings, I’ve reviewed a handful of randomly selected passages from the books and articles I’ve read using the ReadWise app on my iPhone or iPad. These bite-sized reviews are a terrific way to remember and connect with quotes that are meaningful to me.
Daily ReadWise Review
On many mornings, I’ll have an aha! moment from reading a particular passage or the coincidental benefit of seeing these random quotes strung together.
When I discovered the existence of random note widgets, I had another one of those aha! moments. What if I expanded my morning ReadWise sessions to include random book and knowledge notes from Bear?
Review Your Notes with Random Widgets in Bear
This is easy to implement in Bear. Here’s a snapshot of my dedicated Bear home screen on my iPad. I have similar screens on my iPhone and Mac.
Bear Home Screen on iPad
The random widgets (circled in red) serve as my morning reminder to review one knowledge note, book note, journal entry, and vocabulary word. Each pulls from a specific tag in Bear. Here’s an example of how this works for a knowledge note in my system:
Knowledge Note Example
Notice the two tags at the bottom of the note. The knowledge tag organizes the note, and the review/wisdom tag serves as a status. I added this by dragging and dropping all my knowledge notes onto the review/wisdom tag in the sidebar. This instant drag-and-drop tag assignment is one of Bear’s superpowers. Any note with this tag will appear in my knowledge review widget.
Here’s the magic of using a separate status tag instead of the note’s organizational tag for the random widget. Once I review the note, I delete the review/wisdom tag to remove it from the pool. This way, I never review the same note twice.
I currently have three hundred knowledge notes and four hundred book notes. It should take a year — more or less — to review each one. This cadence feels right.
I’ve written thousands of journal entries over the past forty years. I use an Apple Shortcut to pull up those I’ve written on this day over my lifetime, an excellent review method I brought to Bear from Day One. Out of those thousands of entries, I’ve tagged about three hundred as particularly insightful. These are the ones I review with my random journal widget. I may decide after a year to revisit these, or I might switch to other journal tags I’ve used in the past: fatherhood, goals, philosophical musings, etc. Keeping the review tag separate from the journal entry’s organizational tag makes these thoughtful rotations possible.
My fourth widget is a flash-card-style vocabulary review for challenging words I’ve identified in my reading.1 I’ve structured the layout of the note so the definition isn’t visible from my Home Screen. I’ve prepended the title with two colons so these notes don’t clutter up my quick-open note searches. While this works great for vocabulary, the idea could be applied to almost any study topic.
Vocabulary Review Notes in Bear
Eventually, the widgets on my home screen will appear blank, meaning I have completed a circuit through the pool of notes in that category. At this point, I’ll restart the process by dragging the current crop of notes to its appropriate review tag. Any new notes I’ve written will be added to the pool, and the virtuous cycle continues.
Make Review a Daily Habit
I’ve tried to inject substance into these morning review sessions beyond mere passive reading. I follow the outbound links. I review the incoming back-links. I prod myself with questions:
What else have I learned or considered since writing this note that I can add?
Are there other books or articles that I’ve read that relate? Or new knowledge notes I’ve created that I should link?
If it’s a knowledge note, is it still relevant? Alternatively, has it grown so large in links and backlinks that I should carve it into separate ideas?
Can anything in this note help me with what I’m working on right now?
Some reviews are quick. Others are more engaging, particularly when I come across a note from an important book I read a while ago but haven’t fully absorbed or implemented. This kind of review is one of the most valuable ways I learn to apply what I’ve read.
Setting up these widgets on my Mac and my devices took some time, but I have come to appreciate the visual reminder on my home screen. Unlike the myriad ways our devices can distract us, here’s an invitation to quietly reflect on the wisdom and lessons I’ve gathered from the writers and thinkers I admire most.
Best of all, I have a sustainable process that avoids the dreaded black hole syndrome that plagues so many well-intended note systems, and it ensures I’m getting the highest rate of return on my reading and thinking.
If you keep your notes in Bear and haven’t explored note reviews with a random widget, give it a try. If you’re not using Bear, what process do you have in place for review? Let me know in the comments below.
If you read on a Kindle, have a look at the Vocabulary Builder app on your device. It shows a history of the words you’ve looked up in the dictionary. I used this helpful online tool to export these to an Excel spreadsheet and created reviews for the words I looked up at least twice. ↩
There seem to be two kinds of people on this earth—those who love books and everyone else. The bookish have always been far outnumbered, and the gap must be widening in this age of endless digital entertainment. I count myself among the proud minority, but a book, of all things, has brought into question my lifelong practice of keeping a private library.
A recent acquisition illustrates the issue.
“Didn’t you just read this on your Kindle,” Lisa asks me as she flips through the book I’ve brought home.
I dislike direct questioning about my book-buying habits. It feels like the pointed inquiries on medical questionnaires about alcohol consumption.
“Yeah, but I liked it so much I wanted the hard copy,” I tell her.
The fact is, I will likely never read this book, even though I did enjoy it. I bought the book because I like having a visual, tangible record of the time this book and I spent together. I like scanning my shelves and seeing proof of a rich reading life. I like the way a roomful of books makes me feel about myself. Besides, I tell myself, there are worse ways to spend money.
Like most fixations, the origin can often be traced to our youngest days. Pine bookcases flanked the living room fireplace of my childhood home. I can picture the red and black spines of the encyclopedias that filled half those shelves. I spent hours poring over those portals of knowledge at an unnaturally young age. What an odd duck I must have been, this quiet young boy with his nose stuck in an encyclopedia.
A public library beckoned four blocks away, a magical place for a shy little kid. When a kind librarian led me to a shelf of thirty or forty Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators mystery books, I knelt in almost religious piety, awestruck.
I must have viewed that library as a refuge from the troubles my eight-year-old brain struggled to process at home. I felt safer exploring a haunted citadel in Istanbul with Jupiter Jones than I did around my own family. Later, when the divorce was final, and I moved with my mom and new stepdad to a trailer park in Forks, I dreamed of the calm order of that library — the hush and quiet — amidst the babble and grunge of a beaten-down logging town, our family the poorest in a landfill of white trash.
Living hand to mouth at a young age forever shaped my views on the importance of having enough money, but I’ve always spent freely on books. If I look up from where I write this, I can spot my earliest purchases. A Sentimental Education. Look Homeward, Angel. The Sun Also Rises. These old friends have stuck with me my entire life. Eight apartments and three houses, always near.
If I widen my gaze to take in the walls of shelves surrounding me — a collection of some two thousand volumes now — I can trace the outline of my life’s obsessions: boxing, gardening, philosophy, strategy, bird watching, statistics, history, poetry. Shelves and shelves of sailing and tall ships and the sea, books that even here in the desert can launch me miles and miles offshore. And so much great literature: the French, the Russians, the English, the Americans. These last shelved by era, early to late.
Each spine has meaning to me. I recall at a glance where and who I was when I read it. Pulling a book down from the shelves, I feel transported. The heft of the book in my hands, the smell, particularly from my oldest books, wafting up as I thumb through the pages, letting a random passage catch my eye. I read and remember.
In every other part of my life, I am downsizing, simplifying. Most unhappiness stems from a desire for material things. I fantasize about renting a flat in Madrid for three months with just a few clothes, a journal, and my Kindle. And yet, here I sit in this roomful of material things, these books of comfort and consolation, in complete denial of what I know to be true.
I admire those grand Country Manors with their massive libraries passed down for generations. Until recently, I imagined a distant future when my grandchildren and their grandchildren would cherish my library. Yet, times have changed. I have no Country Manor, and books, once the pinnacle of knowledge and wisdom, are no longer quite so prized.
Shaun Bythell, in his memoir, The Diary of a Bookseller, tells the awful truth. In his business, he buys personal libraries from estates. The heir, often the son or daughter of the deceased, shows little emotion toward the collection of dusty books they’ve inherited. “What would I want with all these?” They look around, bewildered. What must have cost a fortune and a lifetime to assemble is sold, gratefully, for $500. My shock when I read about this first encounter turned to numb despair as the situation repeated at various estates throughout the memoir. No one wants these books. No one.
I called my daughter in Los Angeles. She’s a reader like me but prefers a Kindle to physical books. Of course, she wants the books, she said, but without much enthusiasm.
The notion that this library and I might share the same dissolution took a while to accept, like a wild plot twist in a novel you didn’t see coming. Perhaps it never dawned on me how used bookstores acquire so many wonderful books in the first place. I pull down book after book for evidence. A set of Wallace Stegner books I purchased last year bears the previous owner’s carefully inscribed name and address. A Google search turns up the obituary: her death preceded my purchase by two short months.
As I consider the likely future of this little library, I feel more reflective than anguished. After all, books are beacons of light for me, as for many wayward travelers. Let that be enough. My gaze slips along the spines, and I acknowledge each silently. How many thousands of hours have we spent together, ruminating, investigating? How many journeys? These books have shaped and reshaped me. How can you tell where the stories end and the man begins?
I imagine a time when these books take flight, like a great host of swallows, all chaos and boxes and pages aflutter, and in time settle on a thousand different shelves to inspire a thousand new owners.
Until then, let’s commiserate together, my friends, my shipmates. Let us sing on the deck of this foundering ship, our voices a cheer across the ages.
For the past six weeks, I’ve been evaluating an app to replace Craft for my reading notes.This post shares the reasons I’m moving away from Craft and why Bear 2 might be the best app around for writing and thinking on the Mac and iPad.
Craft and the Value of Connected Notes
I use Craft to capture the notes, quotes, and wisdom I’ve gleaned from reading and studying.Before Craft, these notes languished in the margins of books or notecards stuffed in a file box.In three years with Craft, I have written almost four hundred reading notes linked to several hundred dedicated theme notes, creating what is unfortunately called in personal knowledge management circles a “second brain.”
The lofty promises of automatic insights from smart note-taking tools are mostly overblown.I still resort to notecards or a paper notebook when I’m forced to really concentrate. A digital tool does solve the issue of near-instant retrieval, though, and there is goodness in gathering notes together in a trusted system.
So, while Craft may not be self-aware (yet), it has helped me retain and apply more of what I read and let me inch further down the path to wisdom in the process. You can read this earlier post about how I use Craft to help me read better here.
All is not well with Craft, however. Development veered away from its original minimalist design 18 months ago to expand into the lucrative corporate note-taking market. The once pristine interface is now saddled with sharing and collaboration features that aren’t useful to me. With each update, the app gets more complicated to use.
Meanwhile, important shortcomings still need to be addressed. Craft still doesn’t offer a way to use tags to organize notes. Its search function is too dumb to look across blocks of text in a document.Note security lacks encryption or even two-factor authentication. The default font size can’t be increased, straining my tired eyes in the evening. There’s no way to create a backup of my notes database, which seems bonkers. Adding unnecessary insult, the annual subscription cost for Craft just doubled to $96 per year.
Perhaps my biggest issue with Craft is its lack of versatility. In addition to Craft, I keep my journal in Day One and write for others in Ulysses.I tried Craft for all my writing two years ago, but I missed important features and capabilities of these two purpose-built apps, and Craft’s hobbled search function made it very difficult to find anything as the volume of notes increased.
It troubles me to keep silos between my reading notes, my journal, and my public writing when there’s such potential for synergy. Many of the essays on this blog started as entries in my journal. Some were inspired by a book I had read. I am missing out on connections and insights that would be easier to grasp if my writing were centralized in one connected app.
As a result, I’ve been eyeing a new home for my reading notes that might stretch to include my journal and other longer forms of writing. One place for all my words.
A Summer with Obsidian
The obvious choice for most serious note-takers is Obsidian, an app that has exploded in popularity over the past three years. Obsidian is available on most platforms, stores everything in plain text files, takes linking and back-linking to new heights of efficiency and geekiness, and can be customized with a vast array of visual themes and function-adding plugins. Technology bloggers celebrate Obsidian’s ability to easily handle their notes, journaling, and writing.
I spent two months trying out Obsidian as a replacement for Craft last summer. I found the learning curve treacherously steep. For Mac users, the Electron interface is a confusing jumble, reminiscent of my early days with WordPerfect. Persistence and grit are rewarded with a powerful, capable notes app that can do almost anything. Readwise integration works like magic. Obsidian easily handled my 4,000 journal entries from Day One and allowed me to create links between my reading notes and journal without hampering performance or search. Obsidian is continually updated with new features to improve its note-taking capabilities.It truly is a fantastic tool led by a conscientious, values-first team.
I wanted to love Obsidian, and the nerdiest part of me still does.But all that power and customization led to continual tinkering. I experimented endlessly with themes and plugins to perfect my system. I spent hours watching YouTube videos to figure out ways to automate more and more elements of my note-taking. I became proficient with the query programming language of the DataView plugin. Updates to the app and its plugins were frequent but rarely in sync, which resulted in crashes and performance problems that required my attention. The iPad and iPhone apps were slow to open, buggy, and sometimes unusable. Worst of all, I mistook futzing with the app for actual, productive work. I became bedazzled by the technology in the way the hammer shapes the hand.I’m sure at one point or another, I referred to Obsidian as My Precious. In the words of Roland Deschain, I had forgotten the face of my father.
Obsidian may be the perfect app for many, or even most. Just not me.I packed up my notes and returned to Craft.
What’s Important to Me
A weakness in people interested in note-taking apps is the shiny object syndrome. We’re always looking for the next app that will perfect our note-taking system, which is often just procrastination from doing the more challenging work of thinking and writing.I don’t want to be that guy who keeps changing apps or, heaven forbid, only writes about changing apps.
To guide me, I needed to settle on the things that mattered most in a note-taking and writing app:
Intuitive design. I appreciate uncluttered apps that allow me to focus on my words rather than the tool. Minimalist designs appeal the most to me, particularly those that adhere to Apple’s interface rules for the Mac and iPad.
Note linking. The app must be able to link one note to another and show incoming links from other notes.
iPad and iPhone. The app must offer iPad and iPhone apps with feature parity to its desktop app. I do 90% of my writing on an iPad Pro. I review reading notes and drafts of blog posts on an iPad Mini. I frequently capture notes and ideas on my iPhone.The app has got to support all this.
Fast. The app must open quickly, support markdown, and allow keyboard shortcuts to write and navigate my notes.
Search. It must be easy to find notes with simple but effective searching technology.
Versatility.The ideal app handles note-taking, journaling, and longer-form writing without too much compromise of using dedicated (but siloed) apps.
Stability.The last thing I need when I’m trying to capture a fleeting thought is a frozen screen, a crash, or having to update the app again before I can use it. Frequent interface changes for no good reason drive me up the wall.
Reasonable cost. Any monthly or annual subscription cost must match the value received.
Future proof. The tool stores my writing in plain markdown text files or has robust and trusted export capabilities that provide access to my content easily in the future, regardless of the app.
These criteria helped narrow my selection to just a handful of possibilities.One familiar name kept popping up.
Bear 2
The Bear app has been around for a long time.Its first public beta appeared almost ten years ago, putting it into grandfather status compared to its peers. Bear is developed by Shiny Frog, an “artisanal” software firm that makes just this one app, and only for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
The first version of Bear was released in 2016 and earned critical acclaim for its calming and quirky interface and ability to import and export practically any kind of notes file. I used it to tackle the chore of shuttling my notes between Craft and Obsidian.
After a concerning lull in active development, a modernized version of Bear came out last year.Bear 2 supports note linking, offline access to files, tables, tables of content, footnotes, powerful search, and note encryption.I looked at it briefly when it was first released but moved on when I learned its organizational scheme doesn’t support folders.No folders? What?
I decided I should have another look after reading 300 Times a Day, a gushing blog post about Bear written by a writer I admire. What I discovered surprised me.
Designed for Mac
First, Bear is only available on Mac and iOS devices: no Windows, Android, or even a web client.As a result, Bear is developed by Mac users who understand and leverage every aspect of the hardware and software to make it as intuitive and powerful as possible.This shows itself in myriad ways: swiping gestures on the iPad do what you expect.Intuitive keyboard commands exist for everything.It works like a Mac app.
Bear lets you add widgets to your Home Screen for instant access to a favorite note or the last few notes you edited. Sharing notes between apps is seamless. Bear makes good use of Apple Shortcuts for automating note creation.
Bear also supports the Apple Watch to capture thoughts on the go. I thought this might be a gimmick, but I have used it on walks to record notes on audiobooks that I doubtless would have forgotten otherwise.
Bear note capture on Apple Watch
Hidden Power
Beneath its calming interface lurks a set of power functions that rival and, in some cases, exceed those found in Obsidian.You can search for notes by keyword, tag, special operators, and note creation or modification time. Search results extend to the contents of PDFs and images. On the Mac, you can search and replace text within a note (a feature lacking in Craft).
Images in notes can be cropped, resized, and renamed. Any PDFs you insert show a nice preview (optional) and viewer when opened. On the iPad, annotations of PDFs with the Apple Pencil are easy to make.
Bear’s sync engine relies on Apple’s CloudKit technology. In my short time with Bear, syncing notes between my Mac, iPad, and iPhone has been fast and error-free. All notes are encrypted with Apple’s private keys, meaning Bear has no access to my data. The app can be password protected, and individual notes can be further secured with a password. In contrast, none of my notes in Craft were encrypted or even protected with two-factor authentication. A Craft employee or ambitious hacker could read all my notes.In Obsidian, notes are stored as a simple folder of text files, available to anyone with physical access to my computer. To me, Bear feels like the most secure of the bunch.
You can create a complete backup of your Bear notes. It might seem basic, but this was one of my sore spots with Craft that failed to offer any way to back my system other than a raw markdown export of notes.
Import and export functions are truly world-class. Built-in importers exist for Day One, Obsidian, Evernote, TextBundle, and folders of Markdown files.You can export to TextBundle and Markdown as well. If you have PDFs and images in an Obsidian vault, Bear is one of the only apps I know that can import these without breaking attachment links. Documents can be shared in PDF, HTML, RTF, DOCX, and ePub formats.
I imported my Day One journal into Bear as a test of performance. Importing 4,000 journal entries and over 1,000 images and PDFs took under three minutes. Tags from Day One came over flawlessly.Searching those journal entries was lightning fast, and I successfully retrieved entries where the search term was embedded inside a PDF.
Each note has an information panel that displays writing statistics like word count and reading time, a table of contents, and back-links. Back-links are presented in alphabetical order and can optionally show unlinked mentions.A keyboard shortcut toggles these screens on and off.The Mac version allows you to drag the panel to the side so it stays open as you navigate your notes for reference.
Bear has the most powerful web capture of any tool I’ve used, including DevonThink. Share a web page with Bear, and it will convert it to a very presentable note, images and all. I couldn’t do that with Craft or Obsidian.
Exquisite Writing
What I like best about Bear is how it encourages thoughtful, distraction-free writing. The typography is exquisite. You can change the default font, font size, margins, line, and paragraph spacing. Pro customers can choose from 28 built-in themes, but the default, in my eyes, is perfect. With a keyboard shortcut or a quick swipe with your finger, everything disappears but your words.
Markdown symbols are hidden (if you want), and keyboard commands produce all the formatting if you prefer to not type the symbols.You can add footnotes, tables, images, external links, bullet and numbered lists, and quoted passages from a tool palette that pops up as you need it.
Tags
Bear’s organization scheme relies on tags, not folders.This was initially difficult for me to wrap my brain around. I’ve been using folders to store computer stuff for decades.Yet the implementation of tags in Bear is intuitive and powerful.The tags from my Day One journal populated in Bear, and I could nest these under a parent tag called journal by just editing the tag name. Hundreds of notes were updated with the new nested tag name in a couple of keystrokes. In short order, I recreated my folder system from Craft as nested tags in Bear.Tags offer the added benefit of allowing notes to appear in more than one place in your system simply by adding a tag.Working with tags these last six weeks, I no longer see the need for folders, which I guess is what Bear is getting at with their tags-only organization.
Here’s a high-level view of my tags in Bear. You can select custom icons for each, some of which are initially set based on the tag name. Check out what Bear suggested for my “drafts” tag nested under Writing. Only a Mac developer would pay this level of attention to detail and poke fun at the same time.
Tags and screen layout on the Mac in Bear 2
Cost
The pricing for Bear 2 is simple and fair. $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year for all its Pro features. Bear offers a free seven-day free trial.
A Wish List
There are a few areas where Bear falls behind Craft and/or Obsidian that do matter to me.
Better control over back-link presentation.Bear’s back-links are shown in a separate window without any ability to change the sort order. This could be better. Even without unlinked mentions, Craft’s in-note presentation of backlinks is better than Bear or Obsidian.
Templates. Bear doesn’t yet offer the ability to create a new note using a template like Obsidian and Craft. I miss this feature, though it’s not that difficult to copy and paste from a template note. I’ve created my most frequently used templates using Apple Shortcuts, but it would be nice if Bear had the function built in as a keyboard command.
Improved persistence in note links.I experienced what must be a bug when I inadvertently created a note with a name that already existed in my system. Links to the existing note were redirected to the new note without any notice or warning message. If I deleted the new note, all links created for the original note were erased.This could create some serious data loss issues if not corrected.Until this is fixed, I am mindful of naming new notes in Bear.
Version history. With Craft and Obsidian (with its premium sync service), revisions to individual notes are tracked and can be restored from a prior version with just a few clicks. This does not exist in Bear.
Quick open gesture.Bear’s quick open gesture on an iPhone or iPad requires a three finger swipe down from the top of the screen. It works but isn’t always easy to carry out, especially one-handed on an iPhone. I believe pulling down from the top of the screen, which now searches within the note, would be better for this frequently used function.
My list of desires for Bear will be shorter than others interested in document collaboration or using platforms other than Mac and iOS.Bear is working on a web version, which might satisfy some, but honestly, if you’re looking for collaboration or different platforms, Craft is still a great choice. Obsidian is hard to beat if multiple platforms, automation, and customization are essential.
Craft, Obsidian, and Bear — My Scorecard
Features
Craft
Obsidian
Bear
Intuitive Design
8
4
9
Note Linking
9
9
7
Mobile Experience
8
5
9
Performance/Stability
7
9
9
Search
5
10
10
Versatility
6
9
9
Future Proof
7
9
9
Security / Backups
3
8
9
Cost
6
8
10
Overall
6.6
7.9
9.0
Scorecard notes:
Links and Back-Links: Obsidian has world-class back-link capabilities, including unlinked mentions, but loses a point on presentation. Back-links are littered with brackets and garish yellow highlights that are difficult to read and give me headaches.
Future Proof: Craft loses points because alias wiki links revert to the original note name when exported. This export error affected nearly 100 of my Craft notes and took time to track down and correct. Obsidian ought to get a perfect ten since it stores everything in plain text, but the app lacks a TextBundle export function to preserve file links when moving to any other notes app.
Is Bear the one?
I’ve put Bear through its paces these last six weeks. I wrote a half dozen literature notes, over forty journal entries, and four blog posts. I expected Bear’s charm to wear off a little, but the joy is real. I am a little startled at how taken I am with the app.
Still, I understand Bear isn’t for everyone.It’s only available within the Apple ecosystem, lacks collaboration or web access, and can’t be customized or extended with plug-ins. It doesn’t even offer a way to organize your notes with folders.These are deal killers for most.
Steve Jobs believed that “innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things,” so you can focus all your energy on doing one thing incredibly well.The Bear team at Shiny Frog must subscribe to this view. They’ve brought a laser-like focus to making an elegant, powerful writing and notes app for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. For some lucky minority, Bear represents note-taking nirvana, an app closer in spirit to old-school typewriters and handwritten journals than typical feature-bloated software. An app that disappears into the background, letting you zero in on the most essential thing: your words.
It’s clear that Bear can handily replace Craft as my note-taking app.I didn’t expect that Bear could so easily supplant Day One for journaling and Ulysses for writing. These are amazing, purpose-built apps that I’ve enjoyed for years. There are features I’d miss: “On this Day” reflections, journal suggestions and prompts in Day One; WordPress publication and manual sheet reordering in Ulysses. Yet, the power of having all my writing in one connected and comfortable place feels tantalizingly near.
Bear might just become my only digital tool for writing and thinking.
Questions or thoughts about Bear, Craft, or Obsidian? Leave a note in the comment section below.
In the spring of last year, I started reading The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. This is no quick undertaking. Spanning eleven volumes and 10,000 pages, it will take me the rest of this year to finish.
The first volume was published in 1935 when Durant had just turned 50. He published the final volume forty years later. Midway through these decades of writing, Will’s wife Ariel became a co-author and active collaborator in this epic undertaking. Together, they read an average of five hundred books as research for each published volume.
The Story of Civilization is regarded as one of the most compelling narratives of world history ever written. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1968. Goodreads currently gives these books a 4.4 out of 5. Such a high rating is rare, which indicates how readers truly admire the series. Essayist Jamie Todd Rubin chose these as the sole books to take along to his proverbial desert island, which was all the prompting I needed to start this adventure.
While the books were best-sellers during their time, I do wonder how many people got around to reading them. Who has the time to read this much history? After all, this set collected dust on my bookshelves for twenty-five years before I picked up the first volume.
But the intrepid reader who perseveres is in for a telling of history unlike any other. Durant’s writing is clear, colorful, engaging, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. He’s good at digging into the philosophical and religious beliefs of these ancient civilizations to parse out what elements contribute to our present-day ideas and also what, if any, stand up to his skeptical intellect. He pokes fun at the war-mongering gods of Egypt and Persia but shows genuine reverence for the ancient Hindu Upanishads with their belief in impersonal immortality and the oneness we share with the universe. In Ancient Rome, we learn about Julius Caesar and Nero, yes, but also about thinkers like Cicero and Seneca, about the everyday lives of both emperors and peasants, how they cooked, celebrated, and prayed. I feel like I’m on a journey through time with Professor Durant, and he’s motioning for me to sit nearer to him while we take all this in together.
I have a personal reason for reading these books. I inherited the first six volumes from my grandmother, which were a Christmas gift to her from my grandfather in 1959. He died a few years later, before the seventh volume was published and before I had a chance to meet him. My grandmother became a widow at 57, two years younger than I am today. She was always a voracious reader, and I know I inherited my love of learning and books from her.
I have the benefit of my grandmother’s notes in the margins as she read these books some forty years ago. I recognize her cursive handwriting, her exclamation marks, her underlining. I am adding my notes to hers. It’s like we’re reading this grand history together. Maybe one day, my daughter will join us in this shared experience across time and generations.
I am nearing the end of the fifth volume, The Renaissance, which covers the history of Italy from the 14th to mid-16th centuries. My progress is slow but steady. I read an average of 30 pages a night in my little library, hot tea by my side, pen in hand. I’ve come to cherish this time with Professor Durant. There have been more than a few times when my jaw dropped open in sheer disbelief at what I’ve read. I am shocked both by the crazy shit that has happened during the darker periods of our history and that it took so many years for me to learn all of this.
I’ve reached a point in life where I have the time to dedicate to personal projects. Early retirement has its thrills and challenges. Without direction or structure, I could see how I could squander these precious years. But this is something I’ve dreamed of doing since college. I always loved literature and philosophy, but I was too practical to consider a career in academia. Instead, I compromised. I majored in accounting with a personal vow to resume a scholar’s life as soon as financially possible. In hindsight, that is exactly what I have done.
I read a lot, but my knowledge of history is uneven. I’ve read many biographies and a few accounts of specific eras. I have a good grasp of the history of the British Navy during the Age of Sail, early American history, and World War II. I know a little about Ancient Greece and Rome from my readings of philosophy and Stoicism. But these pockets of knowledge feel like tiny stabs of light in an immense underground cavern. Reading Durant, I am slowly illuminating the darkness. I am renewing my education, my scholarship.
Rounding out my knowledge of history complements my other reading as well. How many books have you read that referenced a historical event or leader that you glossed over? If you’re like me, a lot. Having a broad sense of history has deepened my understanding of practically every book I’ve read since I started this adventure. I feel extra synapses firing when I understand a historical reference that would have flown over my head before this newfound knowledge. And with bi-directional links in Craft, my reading notes have exploded in value with the addition of this history overlay. I feel nearer to wisdom the more I read these books.
In the Dark Ages, owning a copy of the Bible was strongly discouraged by the Roman Catholic Church. It was believed that only the clergy could properly interpret the Scriptures. A driving force behind the Italian Renaissance was a loosening of these religious laws to permit a greater pursuit of knowledge, which in turn led to a rediscovery of the philosophy and wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Today, we face a different obstacle. Our attention spans have shortened from the constant dopamine drip of social media and TikTok videos, the binge-worthy Netflix dramas, and the pressure to keep up with present events that wash over us like a river. We divide ourselves into polarizing groups, yet read the same books, the same news feeds, and the same websites, and thus end up thinking the same way. Our horizons are laughably short. Modern wisdom can sometimes feel like an oxymoron.
Perhaps, then, a study of history is the antidote we all need to make sense of this distracted and confusing world. Maybe the context of prior ages could help us better understand our current struggles. As they say, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
