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Bear Notes MCP Server
for every AI assistant

An MCP server that gives your AI assistant full access to your Bear notes. Search with OCR, create, edit, and organize.

  1. Download the .mcpb extension from GitHub Releases
  2. Double-click the file — Claude Desktop shows the install prompt
  3. Done. Start asking Claude about your Bear notes.

Optional settings

Searching, creating, and editing Bear notes from Claude Desktop

What you can do

Real things people do when their notes are one prompt away.

Knowledge search

You wrote it down somewhere, months ago. Ask your AI to find it — across titles, content, and text Bear has indexed from attached images and PDFs.

> Search my Bear notes for meeting decisions about the redesign from last month

Meeting notes

Capture what was discussed, who agreed to what, and create follow-up tasks — all directly in Bear, organized with tags.

> Create a Bear note from our meeting summary and tag it #work/meetings

Research & writing

Pull together scattered notes into an outline. Restructure a draft. Let your AI read what you've already written and help shape it.

> Help me restructure the outline in my 'Product Launch' note

Content creation

Turn your notes into blog posts, newsletters, or documentation. Your AI reads your source material and drafts from what you've already captured.

> Find my research notes on MCP servers and draft a blog post outline

12 tools, three jobs

Each tool does one thing well.

Read & Search

Full-text search across notes, tags, and text Bear has indexed from attached images and PDFs. Filter by tags, date ranges, and pinned status.

Create & Edit

Create notes, insert text at the beginning, end, or within a specific section, replace content, attach files, and archive.

Tag Management

Add, rename, and delete tags across your library. View your full tag hierarchy with note counts.

How it works

What makes this different from other Bear integrations out there.

Local-only

No telemetry, no third-party services, no accounts to create. Your notes go from Bear to your AI assistant and nowhere else.

Real-time

No sync step, no stale data. Your AI sees notes exactly as they are right now.

Any MCP client

Works with Claude, Codex, Gemini, Cursor, Windsurf — not locked to one tool.

Full editing

Section-level add, replace, and append — not just read-only.

OCR search

Searches text that Bear has indexed from attached images and PDFs.

Safety-first

No delete tool. Content replacement is opt-in. Pre-flight validation on every write.

Supply chain clean

Native Node.js SQLite — no unsigned third-party binaries, no Gatekeeper blocks.

Open source

MIT licensed. Read every line, contribute, or fork.

Get started

One-click extension for Claude Desktop, one command for everything else.

  1. Download the .mcpb extension from GitHub Releases
  2. Double-click the file — Claude Desktop shows the install prompt
  3. Done. Start asking Claude about your Bear notes.

Optional settings

Two features are disabled by default. Enable them via environment variables or Claude Desktop extension settings.

UI_ENABLE_CONTENT_REPLACEMENT Enables the text replacement tool. Off by default because replacing content is destructive.
UI_ENABLE_NEW_NOTE_CONVENTION Places tags right after the note title instead of at the bottom.
How to receive updates

FAQ

Is my data safe?
The MCP server itself runs locally, makes no network calls, and collects no telemetry. However, your AI client (Claude, Cursor, etc.) sends note content to its API for inference — that's how AI assistants work. The server doesn't add any data exposure beyond what you'd get by pasting a note into the chat yourself.
What does the red warning about "access to everything on your computer" mean?
Claude Desktop's permission warning system doesn't distinguish between accessing a single file and accessing everything. The extension only needs one file: Bear's SQLite database. You can verify this yourself — the source code is fully open.
Does it work with AI assistants other than Claude?
Yes. It works as a standalone MCP server with any MCP-compatible client — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, and others. The Claude Desktop extension (.mcpb) is Claude-specific, but the npm package works everywhere.
What are the requirements?
macOS only, since Bear is a macOS app. For the Claude Desktop extension, you just need Bear and Claude Desktop installed. For standalone npm usage, you also need Node.js 24.13.0 or later.
Can it search inside images and PDFs attached to notes?
Yes. Bear indexes text from attached images and PDFs via OCR. The MCP server searches that indexed text — it doesn't perform OCR itself.
Can it modify or delete my notes?
It can create notes, add text, and manage tags out of the box. The text replacement tool (bear-replace-text) is opt-in and disabled by default — you must explicitly enable it in settings, since replacement is a destructive operation.
Why does it read the database directly instead of using Bear's URL API?
Bear's x-callback-url API returns data in x-success responses, which requires a server or binary to handle — that's fragile and introduces security concerns. Direct read-only SQLite access is simpler and more reliable.
How can I report a bug or contribute?
Open an issue or start a discussion on the GitHub repository. Bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests are all welcome.
Are you affiliated with Bear? Why are you doing this?
Because I can 😀 and I am not affiliated with Bear development team. I am a regular user of Bear notes just like you and want to have it in my AI tools.