This server offers powerful search and editing capabilities for Bear Notes, but it's unofficial and requires user awareness of permissions and risks. It's well-suited for privacy-conscious local-first users, but not for those unfamiliar with MCP or with simple small-library needs.
Bear Notes MCP Server is an unofficial, opinionated MCP server for Bear Notes. It provides relevance-ranked search instead of substring matching, with results ranked across titles, bodies, and hierarchical tags, complete with snippets and combinable filters (tag, date, pinned). Reads run directly against Bear's SQLite database, no Bear app required for queries. Writes route through Bear's own URL handler, atomic and validated by Bear. Offline-first: no network calls, no telemetry. Works with any MCP client. Ships as a one-click .mcpb extension for Claude Desktop or a standalone npm package.
Claude Desktop Extension:
bear-notes-mcpb-*.mcpb file from [Releases](https://github.com/vasylenko/bear-notes-mcp/releases).Standalone MCP Server (other clients):
- Requires Node.js 24.13.0+.
- For Claude Code: claude mcp add -s user bear-notes -- npx -y bear-notes-mcp@latest.
- For other clients, add the JSON configuration to your MCP configuration file.
Example config:
{
"mcpServers": {
"bear-notes": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "bear-notes-mcp@latest"]
}
}
}{
"mcpServers": {
"bear-notes": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "bear-notes-mcp@latest"]
}
}
}