Posts tagged with "Bear"

The Bear Team Releases Public Beta of Lettera, a New Mac Markdown Editor

Today, the team behind note-taking app Bear announced the public beta of Lettera, a new Mac text editor, based on Panda, an earlier beta that was used to work out the Bear 2.0 text editing engine. That immediately caught my eye because I’ve been using Panda for months. In fact, it’s the default way I open Markdown files now.

What drew me to Panda was the automation work I’ve been doing with agents. I use the Superpowers plugin (which got an excellent 6.0 update this week) with both Codex and Claude Code, which generates plans, design documents, and specs as part of its process. Panda turned out to be a great way to read those documents because the Bear 2.0 UI is excellent, and with Panda, I could open any Markdown file as a standalone document that didn’t require importing it into Bear itself.

According to the Bear team’s post today, Lettera is designed to preserve Panda’s simple approach to Markdown files and extend it to the Mac’s file system:

Lettera works around your setup. Open a single file to read and edit it, or open a folder as your writing workspace…

That way, Lettera can be used as your default Markdown editor no matter where Markdown files are saved, which is how I’ve been using Panda, or as a text editor with a dedicated folder of working files in iCloud, which is a departure from Bear, which hides the file system from users. Other features will be familiar to anyone who has used Bear before, including its excellent Markdown rendering, versioning, a table of contents sidebar, and support for multiple export formats.

I’ve only just scratched the surface of Lettera, but I was already a fan of the more limited Panda, so I expect Lettera to quickly become the text editor I use for any writing that isn’t an article like this one, for which I’m still using Obsidian, thanks to its extensive plugin catalog.

You can download the beta of Lettera from the Bear post announcing the app.

Shiny Frog Releases Bear 2.0

Today, Shiny Frog launched Bear 2.0, a ground-up rewrite of its popular note-taking app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac that has been years in the making. The new version has been rebuilt with a custom text editing engine and introduces a long list of features, including:

  • Tables
  • Section folding
  • Tables of contents and backlinks
  • Footnotes
  • Nested text styling
  • Sketching
  • Sidebar pinning
  • Link and PDF previews
  • Image cropping and resizing
  • Custom fonts and new themes
  • And more

A lot has happened in the note-taking world since Bear was first released on the App Store in 2016 and won over writers with its modern design and Markdown-friendly features. Block-based editors like Craft and Notion have become popular as have a long list of plain-text editors, like Obsidian and Roam Research, that support wiki-style linking.

With Bear 2.0, Shiny Frog seems to be trying to thread a needle by maintaining the elegant design of the Bear 1.0 while accommodating the advanced features of more recent entrants to the note-taking category. That’s not easy to do, but I like what I’ve seen in my early use of the update.

Today’s update comes with a new price structure too. Bear is available on the App Store as a free download but requires a subscription for some features. As Shiny Frog announced in the spring, existing subscribers won’t be charged more as long as they maintain their current subscription, but new users (and re-subscribers) will pay $2.99/month or $29.99/year.