Testing Bear's export formatting and editor

12 Oct 2025

I don't need another blogging platform. My blog has been on Blot.im for three years and its been fine, but seeing what Annie Mueller wrote about friction when blogging (and her eventual move to Pika) made me start to think: What would it look like if my process didn't require creating new Markdown files in Dropbox and waiting for them to sync? What if I didn't constantly postpone blogging because it wasn't a priority? What if things were easier?

So I looked hard at Pika and almost went for it, until I saw how much JavaScript gets mushed into every Pika-generated blog post. And then compared that to how there is no JavaScript on every Bear-generated post. This page you're looking at right now is 318 KB, and 283 kB (88.9%) of that is the image of my cat, leaving 35 KB of HTML and CSS.

I already knew that exporting from Bear was immediate and easy (and to be fair, Pika just introduced instant exports). But what is formatting like in the Bear editor? Here are some examples:

• Bullets
• Like
• This

Bolded, italics and strikethrough.

Here is a wise blockquote. Blah blah blah.

And then some code:

(() => {
  const now = new Date()
  let hours = now.getHours()
  const minutes = now.getMinutes().toString().padStart(2, '0')
  const ampm = hours >= 12 ? 'pm' : 'am'
  hours = hours % 12
  if (hours === 0) hours = 12
  return `${hours}:${minutes} ${ampm}: `
})()

What about…

An H2 heading

And some more body text.

This would be a hyperlink to my old Blot.im blog.

And lastly, a photo of Tiger:

Bear it is!