My friend asked if there was a way to quickly append a thought to a Bear note from iOS. While Bear has a great Share Sheet integration which does allow you to append the “thing”1 to a note, just adding text is a bit harder.

In steps Shortcuts to save the day with a widget and a workflow to make it happen quick.

Here’s a look at the Shortcut.

It starts by getting Shortcuts to ask us for input. This will open an input box on the screen of our iOS device.

From there we tell Bear to append the text to a specific note. You can grab the note identifier by swiping left on the note in Bear and then choosing more. Next pick “Copy notes’ identifier” and paste that identifier in Shortcuts.

Make sure you set the Shortcut to be available as a widget and you’ll see it when you swipe right from your main Home Screen in iOS.


You can download the Shortcut here. Make sure you change the Bear note identifier to whatever note you want to append to regularly.

Oh, and I did a quick video of it working as well.


  1. Like a webpage, or text or…whatever