A Bear-shaped notes app for everyone else
Mare is an opinionated copy of Bear for Windows and Linux. Stupid fast, native and out of your way, with notes in a plain folder you can share through git.
Why Mare exists
Bear is pretty much the **perfect** writing app. It is stupid fast, native and gets out of the way. It is also available everywhere tied to iCloud. mare/why bear
What Mare keeps
Click a styled word. Its markers show only while the caret is inside.
Where notes live
In notes/why-mare-exists-k3f9x2a1.md, a plain file in a folder that is also a git repository. See How a workspace is stored.
Yes, this is a copy of Bear
Bear is pretty much the perfect writing app. The tight integration and the carefully thought out interface are what make it great. They are also its one real limit: it lives inside the Apple ecosystem, and sync means iCloud.
I need to collaborate and share. Sometimes you have to own your work, or hand it to someone who does not have a Mac, and notes locked in iCloud rule that out. So Mare takes the good parts, being stupid fast, native, low on overhead and out of the way, and keeps the notes in a folder that is yours.
You are welcome to use Mare on macOS. If you are on a Mac and just want something that works right now, please consider Bear and show the original team some love.
Visit bear.appStupid fast, and it stays that way
No browser inside
Mare is written in Go and draws its own interface. There is no Electron and no web view, so there is no page to load before you can type.
Asleep until you type
The window redraws when something changes and does nothing the rest of the time. An open note that nobody is touching is not using your CPU.
One file to run
Fonts, icons and the editor ship in a single binary. No runtime to install, no background service, no account.
What it does
- Live markdown
- Headings, bold, italic, underline, strike, highlight, code, links and tags are styled as you type. The markers hide until the caret is inside them.
- Blocks
- Nested lists that renumber themselves, todos, quotes, callouts, tables with a cell editor, code blocks with syntax colours, footnotes and foldable headings.
- Tags as folders
- Write #tag or #nested/tag anywhere in a note. The sidebar builds its tree from them, so filing a note is a matter of typing a word.
- Links between notes
- Type [[ to link another note. Rename a note and every link that points at it follows.
- Attachments
- Drop or paste images and files. Images resize, align and let text wrap around them. The same file used in ten notes is stored once.
- Diagrams and previews
- A mermaid code block renders as a diagram and turns back into code when you click it. A web address on its own line can become a card with the page's title and image.
Your notes are a folder
A workspace is a directory you can read without the app, and it is also a git repository. Any remote you can push to is a sync target: GitHub, a company server, a Raspberry Pi in a cupboard.
Share a workspace the way you share code. When two machines change the same note metadata, Mare merges the two databases row by row, so git never hands you a binary conflict.
Notes/ notes/ polar-bears-k3f9x2a1.mdplain markdown, one file per note attachments/ ab/abcdef….pngfiles named by their content hash .mare/ mare.dbpins, archive and trash state, committed local/search index and caches, ignored by git
Download Mare
Version 0.4.0. Free. One file per platform, nothing to sign up for.
Windows
Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
Download for Windowsmare-0.4.0-windows-x64-setup.exe, or Portable zip
Linux
x86-64, X11 or Wayland
macOS
Apple silicon and Intel
There is a Mac build and you are welcome to it. First, a short boat trip, made a bit tedious on purpose.
On a Mac, Bear is the quicker choice, and paying for it supports the people who worked all of this out in the first place. Mare on macOS makes sense when you share a workspace with people on Windows or Linux. If that is you, sail to the lighthouse. Rain sends you back to port.