Bear keyboard tricks you might not know

Like many other developers, I don’t like using a mouse or touchpad for actions that can be done faster with keyboard shortcuts. So, here are some of the lesser-known Bear keyboard shortcuts that I’ve only discovered recently.

Searching across all notes

You probably know that you can use ⌘F to focus on the search bar. This search is scoped per the currently selected tag in the sidebar.

But, there’s an option to remove that scoping. To search across all notes, regardless of the selected tag, use ⇧⌘F.

Quickly creating new notes from the search

You can press ⌘N to create a note with the text that was entered in the search bar. I find this very useful to ensure there are no duplicate notes.

Creating notes from selected text

If you select a text and press ⇧⌘N, a new note will be created from the selected text. Pretty useful when extracting quotes into new notes, for example.

No distraction writing

I find the sidebar distracting while I’m writing. Thankfully there’s a keyboard shortcut that I regularly use for hiding it: ^1.

Pair this with fullscreen mode (^⌘F), and you get a zen writing experience, free of all distractions.