bear-cli

bear-cli is a native Rust CLI for Bear that talks directly to Bear's CloudKit container.

Features

• authenticate with Bear's CloudKit web flow
• list, open, search, and export notes
• inspect tags and tag membership
• create notes, edit note text, attach files, trash, and archive
• rename and delete tags
• compute duplicates, stats, health checks, and other library summaries from CloudKit data

Requirements

• macOS
• a Bear account with iCloud sync enabled
• network access to Apple's CloudKit endpoints

Installation

From crates.io

cargo install bear-cli

From source

git clone https://github.com/BIRSAx2/bear-cli
cd bear-cli
cargo install --path .

The installed binary name is bear.

Authentication

Authenticate once before using CloudKit-backed commands:

bear auth

The auth flow opens a localhost page and prefers Safari for CloudKit sign-in on macOS.

If you already have a valid ckWebAuthToken, you can save it directly:

bear auth --token '<CK_WEB_AUTH_TOKEN>'

On success the token is saved locally and reused by subsequent commands.

Usage

bear --help
bear notes
bear open-note --title "My Note"
bear search crypto --json
bear create "# Scratch"
bear add-text --title "Scratch" "more text"

Commands

Reading notes and tags

• notes
• open-note
• tags
• open-tag
• search
• export
• duplicates
• stats
• health
• untagged
• todo
• today
• locked

Examples:

bear notes
bear notes --limit 50
bear notes --json
bear open-note --id 721FF116-185F-4474-8730-60D29995A4A4
bear open-note --title "Systems Security"
bear search Systems
bear search Systems --since 2026-04-01 --before 2026-04-17 --json
bear open-tag work
bear tags
bear export ./notes --frontmatter --by-tag
bear duplicates --json
bear stats --json
bear health --json
bear todo
bear today

Writing notes and tags

• create
• add-text
• add-file
• trash
• archive
• rename-tag
• delete-tag

Examples:

bear create "# Scratch"
bear create "# Project note" -t work -t rust
bear add-text --title "Scratch" "append me"
bear add-text --title "Scratch" --mode prepend "top section"
bear add-text --title "Scratch" --mode replace-all "# Rewritten"
bear add-file ./note.txt --title "Scratch"
bear archive --search "old note"
bear trash --search "temporary"
bear rename-tag inbox archive/inbox
bear delete-tag old-tag

Notes

• All operational commands are CloudKit-based.
• Authentication is required for both reads and writes.
• The CloudKit API token used by this project was reverse-engineered from Bear Web's public frontend bundle.
• The auth flow is browser-sensitive. Safari is the preferred path on macOS.
• Some large-note edge cases may still require additional CloudKit asset-handling work if Bear stores note bodies outside textADP.

Development

cargo build
cargo test
cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings