Bear Notes

Use

grizzly

to create, read, and manage notes in Bear on macOS.

Requirements

• Bear app installed and running
• For some operations (add-text, tags, open-note --selected), a Bear app token (stored in

  ~/.config/grizzly/token

  )

Getting a Bear Token

For operations that require a token (add-text, tags, open-note --selected), you need an authentication token:

1. Open Bear → Help → API Token → Copy Token
2. Save it:

   echo "YOUR_TOKEN" > ~/.config/grizzly/token

Common Commands

Create a note

echo "Note content here" | grizzly create --title "My Note" --tag work
grizzly create --title "Quick Note" --tag inbox < /dev/null

Open/read a note by ID

grizzly open-note --id "NOTE_ID" --enable-callback --json

Append text to a note

echo "Additional content" | grizzly add-text --id "NOTE_ID" --mode append --token-file ~/.config/grizzly/token

List all tags

grizzly tags --enable-callback --json --token-file ~/.config/grizzly/token

Search notes (via open-tag)

grizzly open-tag --name "work" --enable-callback --json

Options

Common flags:

• --dry-run

  — Preview the URL without executing

• --print-url

  — Show the x-callback-url

• --enable-callback

  — Wait for Bear's response (needed for reading data)

• --json

  — Output as JSON (when using callbacks)

• --token-file PATH

  — Path to Bear API token file

Configuration

Grizzly reads config from (in priority order):

1. CLI flags
2. Environment variables (

   GRIZZLY_TOKEN_FILE

   ,

   GRIZZLY_CALLBACK_URL

   ,

   GRIZZLY_TIMEOUT

   )

3. .grizzly.toml

   in current directory

4. ~/.config/grizzly/config.toml

Example

~/.config/grizzly/config.toml

:

token_file = "~/.config/grizzly/token"
callback_url = "http://127.0.0.1:42123/success"
timeout = "5s"

Notes

• Bear must be running for commands to work
• Note IDs are Bear's internal identifiers (visible in note info or via callbacks)
• Use

  --enable-callback

  when you need to read data back from Bear
• Some operations require a valid token (add-text, tags, open-note --selected)