💻 Bearing, my new macOS helper tool for Bear.app

TL;DR

I built a little helper tool named Bearing which allows for scripting Bear. It adds to Bear’s own capabilites by slightly abstracting and enhancing the experience:

There’s a dedicated bearing CLI tool that accepts plain arguments. No more bear://… calls, no more URL-encoding anything.
The CLI tool returns callback responses as JSON.

https://github.com/carlo/bearing

Why?

A few weeks back I switched from Evernote to Bear. I like Bear a lot (Markdown!) but its lack of Applescript support is irritating. Out of the box, Bear can be automated using its x-callback-url API, yes. But you don’t get any return values for those calls in a simple way.

I guess that’s why all existing Bear-related scripts go H.A.M. on its SQLite DB. The Bear FAQs say the following about that:

For most users in most situations, we highly recommend not [to work with Bear’s database]

Great. Also: understandable. That led to me setting out to build a simple wrapper app so I could work with Bear from command line and scripts in a easy and structured way without putting the notes database at risk.

What can it do?

Example: Creating a note

/usr/local/bin/bearing \
  create \
  --title="Bearing test note" \
  --text="Works for me!"

… returns …

{
  "title": "Bearing test note",
  "identifier": "4963F8B4-3FE0-4835-B96D-7DCCB6101A62-1917-00013DC4BC4EE819",
  "_success": true
}

Searching, tagging, editing etc are supported, as is everything else the x-callback-url API allows for. :)

Dope, let’s go

More information on usage, installation and whathaveyou can be found on Github:
https://github.com/carlo/bearing

It’s still early days, and it definitely still has a few rough edges, there are bugs. If you find any, just let me know, please!