Bear Notes MCP Server

An unofficial, opinionated MCP server for Bear Notes — built around relevance-ranked search instead of substring matching. Results come ranked across titles, bodies, and hierarchical tags, with snippets and combinable filters (tag, date, pinned). Reads run direct against Bear's SQLite database — no Bear app required for queries.

Writes route through Bear's own URL handler — atomic and validated by Bear. Offline-first: no network calls, no telemetry, all processing on your Mac. Works with any MCP client — Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Cursor. Ships as a one-click .mcpb extension or a standalone npm package.

Example prompts:

Find the deep-dive I wrote on export pipelines, somewhere under #engineering/

Append today's decisions to the 'Decisions' section of my Weekly Ops note

Pull every note under #research/llm-evals into a survey outline

Find my notes tagged #blog/drafts and draft this week's post outline

✨ Key Features

• Read-only by default — flip Edit Mode for writes. 4 tools always on (search, open, find untagged, list tags); 8 more in Edit Mode for create, edit, attach, tag, archive
• Relevance-ranked search across titles, bodies, and tags — finds the right note, not just the ones that contained your literal words
• Date-based search with relative dates ("yesterday", "last week", "start of last month")
• Hierarchical tag management — view tags as a tree with note counts; rename or delete a tag across the whole library
• Surgical writes — append at a specific heading or replace a section without rewriting the whole note
• File attachments — attach images, PDFs, and documents up to 25 MB; symlinks rejected for safety
• New note convention (opt-in) — place tags right after the title instead of at the bottom
• Local-first — direct read-only SQLite reads, native node:sqlite, no network calls, no telemetry

[!NOTE] Complete privacy (except the data you send to your AI provider when using an AI assistant, of course): this server makes no external connections. All processing happens locally on your Mac using Bear's own database and API. There is no extra telemetry, usage statistics or anything like that.

👤 Who is this for

This is an unofficial, opinionated alternative to the native Bear MCP. It fits when:

• You have years of notes and substring search isn't enough. Search ranks results by relevance — titles, bodies, and tag matches across the whole library — so the right note rises to the top, even when your phrasing has drifted.

• You bounce between MCP clients. Stdio transport works with Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini, Cursor, Windsurf — anything that speaks MCP. No per-client glue code, no lock-in.

• You want to query without pulling Bear forward. Reads run straight against Bear's SQLite database. No need to keep Bear open — or even running — for a quick lookup mid-conversation. (Writes still route through Bear, atomically.)

• You manage tags across the whole library. Rename or delete a tag everywhere it appears, atomically. Hierarchical tag matching in search rolls up subtags automatically — work that's tedious through Bear's UI alone.

• You care about supply-chain hygiene. Native node:sqlite — no unsigned third-party binaries, no Gatekeeper hassles. Network-free server: no remote-fetch tools, no prompt-injection surface.