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Can we smoosh iA Writer, Bear, and Obsidian together

Nov 15, 2022

I use iA Writer, Bear, and Obsidian these days. I use iA Writer for writing (like writing this post), Bear for notes, and Obsidian at work for work notes. I wish all three could be smooshed together.

  • iA Writer is the best for writing in. The fonts and layout are amazing, not to mention focus and typewriter mode.
  • Bear is the best for notes with attachments. Adding a picture in a file based notes app is painful and sad.
  • Obsidian queries working on individual blocks of text are so cool, and the wikilink previews (and backlinks) are much more powerful than Bear. It makes generating something like a brag document very easy. As you record something, tag it with #brag and then query for each of them.

A quick example of Obsidian queries. Two separate daily notes with a #workouts tag on them.

I’d drop Bear for Obsidian on features, but Bear is miles ahead on UI, especially on mobile. Bear 2.0 seems like it will be released “soon”, but I might start taking advantage of Bear’s export to markdown features to then import in Obsidian for querying.

Posted: November 2022