Bear Pi Extension

A Pi extension that integrates Bear notes through the Bear macOS CLI.

This extension depends on the system-installed Bear app CLI (/Applications/Bear.app/Contents/MacOS/bearcli). It provides full support for listing, searching, reading, creating, and updating Bear notes directly from your Pi agent.

Prerequisites

• macOS
• Bear 2.8+ installed (must include bearcli in the app bundle)
• Pi coding agent

Installation

1. Clone or copy this package to a directory of your choice.
2. Run npm install inside the folder to install dependencies.
3. Link the extension to your local Pi agent configuration by adding it to ~/.pi/settings.json or .pi/settings.json in your project:

{
  "extensions": [
    "/absolute/path/to/bear-pi"
  ]
}

Alternatively, you can test it directly:

pi -e ./src/index.ts

Available Tools

• bear_search: Search notes using Bear's native syntax (e.g., @todo, #work).
• bear_list: List recent notes.
• bear_read: Fetch a complete note along with its metadata.
• bear_create: Create a new note.
• bear_update: Overwrite an existing note.
• bear_open: Open the note directly in the Bear UI.

Capabilities Map

Pi Action / Tool	BearCLI Subcommand
bear_search	bearcli search
bear_list	bearcli list
bear_read	bearcli show
bear_create	bearcli create
bear_update	bearcli overwrite
bear_open	bearcli open

Next Steps (MCP Mode)

Currently, the extension shells out directly to bearcli commands via an adapter pattern in src/bearcli.ts. Since Bear 2.8+ provides a built-in MCP server, you can migrate this extension to use MCP by swapping the adapter to communicate over stdio using bearcli mcp-server. This would enable standard MCP tool discovery.

To test MCP, run:

bearcli mcp-server

For now, direct CLI commands are used for simplicity, minimal overhead, and exact output control.