Bear Diary Shortcuts

This shortcut is part of a longer list of shortcuts that help you maintain a diary in Bear.

Shortcuts in this series

1. Core Shortcut (this one)
2. Urgent & Important
3. Thought
4. Question
5. Meeting
6. Menu Shortcut (coming soon)

You need this shortcut in order to run all the other in this series.

You'll need an iCloud account with space in it to save the reference to the latest note and the date it refers to. For more details on this refer to the end of this description.

Core Shortcut

This is the shortcut that does most of the heavy lifting in this series of shortcuts.

Basic functionality

When you open this shortcut you're going to be prompted with the following question:

What do you want to add to your diary?

After you enter some text and confirm, the text you entered is going to be added to a note on Bear that looks like the following:

Diary 2019/01/27

Your text

#Diary/2019/01/27

If you run it again, you're asked the same question and your note will look like the following after you answer it.

Diary 2019/01/27

Your text

Your new text

#Diary/2019/01/27

If you're familiar with Bear you must have noticed the tag at the bottom and how that creates a tag structure that will look like the following after some time:

Diary

2019

01

27

28

29

30

31

02

01

02

Share Sheet functionality

I mentioned input in the beginning and that's because there are other ways how to get data into this shortcut. One of the ways is through the share sheet. You can use it to add any kind of content into your Diary. If you add a photo you're going to end up with the following note:

Diary 2019/01/27

Your text

Your new text

#Diary/Image

#Diary/2019/01/27

The note above contains a new type of tag. This helps you finding notes with similar types of files. You can end up with the following tag structure.

Diary

2019

01

27

28

29

30

31

02

01

02

Image

Media

I’ve only tested with images and audio files, but feel free to experiment with other types and let me know in the comments which other tags it creates.

Reference file

A reference file is used to keep track of the latest note you created. This is created in your Shortcuts folder on your iCloud account. This contains a small JSON like the one next. This JSON will only contain one entry so it won’t take more space than initially.

{“latestEntry":
    {"date":"2019\/01\/27",
     "identifier":"63DEC2B7-5926-48E2-B854-A29FF5B7DDF3-737-000000673BF3135F”}
}