Global Todo list in Bear Notes

Advanced shortcut to list all your action items in Bear Notes

You probably already know that I am a big fan of Bear Notes. And I keep exploring all the various possibilities this little app provides to anyone who is serious about the Note Taking (but at the same time strives to keep things simple).

While being an Apple-native application, one of the great advantages of Bear Notes is an extensive support of Apple Shortcuts. In this article I am going to show how to use them in a smart way to do one little trick that Bear app does not support out of the box.

I am talking about creating one Global Todo list that will show all the actionable items from all your notes collection in one single note.

You know that by default, Bear does provide a way to list notes, which have uncompleted checklist items in them — it’s called “Todo”. But this view shows you the notes themselves, it their fullness, so to say, and to see where exactly the action item is — you have to look through every single note individually.

That’s how default Todo filter works

If you’re actively using checklists and action items across your notes, as your digital knowledge system grows, finding particular actionable items that you have within it becomes really hard. So this shortcut below should significantly ease the pain of tracking actions in Bear.

The Logic

First of all, let’s manually create a note named “Global Todo” and leave it blank. It will store all the items our shortcut will be able to find. This list is going to be refreshed (rewritten from scratch) every time you run the shortcut. But we need to do it the smart way, and to prevent duplicates from popping up, we need to replace any existing content in this note with some temporary text as our very first step.

So I do this

Then the shortcut looks for all the notes that contain incomplete action items. This can be done via “Search notes containing “- [ ]”:

With every note found we need to do the following:

1. List out the full text of the note
2. Split this text by lines

Then, with every line in this split text we need to check if it contains our todo pattern: “— [ ]”. The regex for that is

— \[\ \](.*)

We’ll use it in scope of a “Match” operator:

If the line matches the criteria, we save it as text. Otherwise we do nothing.

This first “repeat with each” cycle ends with 1 note fully processed — we format the output so that the result will have

1. Clickable Note title
2. Lines with action items found below the Note title

We repeat this for every note found, so the result of the “outer” cycle will be the full list of notes found and specific action items found within them.

Then, we add the final text result to the note found on step 1 — i.e. “Global Todo”.

If you don’t want to open the shortcuts app every time to actualize your list of todos, there’s one little touch you can add into the note — a “🔁 Refresh” button. Yep, you can trigger specific shortcut using its exact name in the x-callback URL request to Apple Shortcuts.

Like that:

This is it. Hope you guys find it useful. The shortcut itself:

Shortcuts