Prexy Support

Help, vocabulary and troubleshooting for Prexy on Mac and iPhone.

Need a person?

Email shearm@mac.com. Prexy is made by one person, so a reply may take a few days — but every message is read. It helps enormously if you say which device you were using, what you expected, and what happened instead.

Privacy questions are answered on the privacy policy page.

What Prexy is

Prexy is a notes app for people working on stories. Every note is a story: it carries a short name (a slug), a beat, and a status, so a working file and the list of what you owe are the same thing rather than two systems to keep in step.

Notes sync between your Mac and your iPhone or iPad through your own iCloud account, and the Mac keeps a plain-Markdown copy of every note in a folder you choose — so your writing is readable, greppable and backup-able without Prexy running.

Requirements

macOS 26 or later, iOS 26 or later.
An iCloud account, signed in on each device, with iCloud Drive enabled — that is what syncing uses. Prexy works perfectly well on a single device with iCloud off; you just won't get sync.
Nothing else. There is no account to create, no subscription, and no server of ours to be reachable.

First run

On the Mac

Prexy asks where to keep the plain-Markdown copy of your notes. Choose a folder you can find again — ~/Documents is the usual answer — and Prexy creates a Story Desk Notes folder inside it. (If you already have that folder from an earlier version, pick the folder itself and Prexy will use it rather than nesting a second one.)

Granting that folder is what lets a sandboxed app write outside its own container. If you skip it, Prexy still works, but the Markdown copy is buried in the app's private container where nothing else can see it — so it is worth doing.

On the iPhone or iPad

There is nothing to set up. Notes appear as iCloud delivers them.

The vocabulary

Prexy uses newsroom words on purpose. Here is what each one means inside the app.

Term	What it means in Prexy
Story	One note. There is no separate "project" object — the note is the unit of work.
Slug	The story's short name, the way a desk would refer to it in a rundown. It names the note and the Markdown file on disk.
Beat	The desk a story belongs to. A new install starts with a generic, editable list (politics, business, technology, health, science, education, crime, courts, culture, sports). Rename, delete and add your own in Settings → Beats; nothing is hard-coded.
Status	One of three: Not Started, In Progress, Completed. The board's three tabs are these, with counts.
Board	The window listing your stories by status and beat. On the Mac it can live in the Dock, the menu bar, or both.
Mirror	The plain-Markdown copy of every note, written to the folder you chose. See below.
Doc-linked task	A checkbox line inside a story that is also a reminder in Apple Reminders. Optional; off until you turn it on.
Story link	A link from one story to another. The story being linked to shows a backlink, so you can see what points at it.
Conflict copy	A separate note Prexy makes when the same story was edited on two devices and neither edit can be safely discarded. Nothing is thrown away; you decide.

Where your notes actually live

Three places, and it is worth knowing all three:

On the device, in Prexy's own private container. This is the working copy the app reads and writes.
In your iCloud private database, if you have iCloud on. This is your Apple account, billed against your iCloud storage. Nobody else — including the developer — can see it.
In the Markdown mirror folder you chose (Mac only). One .textbundle per note, named <slug>-<id>.textbundle. A textbundle is an ordinary folder: inside it, text.md is your note as plain Markdown, info.json holds the note's identity, and assets/ holds any attachments. You can open text.md in any editor.

The mirror is a one-way copy for reading, backing up and searching from outside the app. Editing text.md by hand is not how to change a note — edit in Prexy.

Sync

How long should sync take?

Usually seconds, but up to about a minute is normal, and that delay is iCloud's delivery schedule rather than anything Prexy can hurry along. There is deliberately no "sync now" button, because there is nothing for it to do.

A note isn't appearing on my other device.

Check both devices are signed into the same Apple Account, and that iCloud Drive is on.
Give it a minute, then bring the app to the foreground — iCloud delivers more eagerly to an app that is in front of you.
A device that has been offline catches up when it reconnects; nothing is lost in the meantime.

I have two copies of the same story.

That is a conflict copy, and it means you edited the story in two places before they had a chance to reconcile. Prexy keeps both rather than picking a winner: open each, take what you want, and delete the one you no longer need. Every note also has a version history you can read if you want to see how it got that way.

Doc-linked tasks and Apple Reminders

A checkbox line in a story can become a reminder in Apple Reminders, and ticking it in either place ticks it in both. Turn it on in Settings → Tasks and pick the list you want reminders to land in; Prexy will ask for Reminders access the first time.

Only checkbox lines you create through Prexy's task command become reminders. Typing - [ ] by hand deliberately does not — otherwise turning the feature on would flood your Reminders with every checkbox you had ever written.
Prexy never sets a due date, and never changes one you set. Scheduling is Reminders' job, and overwriting your dates would be the wrong kind of helpful.
Moving a reminder to a different list in Reminders is safe — the link survives.
Turning the feature off stops the syncing; it does not delete the reminders you already have.

Formatting and Markdown

Prexy writes real Markdown, which means a few rich-text things have no Markdown spelling and cannot survive the round trip. When you are about to do something that would lose formatting on the way to the file, Prexy tells you so in a banner rather than letting it happen quietly.

Known limits worth knowing about: fenced code blocks with a language tag (```swift) are not fully supported, and an image or link written with no visible text has nowhere to keep its target. If formatting ever looks wrong on screen, open text.md in the mirror folder — the file is the truth, and it is usually right.

Backups

The Mac app takes its own daily backup of the note store, in addition to the Markdown mirror. You can see and change this in Settings → Storage. Because the mirror is plain files in a folder you chose, Time Machine and any other backup tool already cover your writing without knowing anything about Prexy.

Troubleshooting

After reinstalling, Prexy can't write to my notes folder.

Permission to use a folder outside the app's container is tied to the app's signature, so reinstalling can invalidate it. Go to Settings → Storage and choose the folder again — pick the existing Story Desk Notes folder itself and nothing is duplicated.

Reminders access was never asked for, or was refused.

Check System Settings → Privacy & Security → Reminders (or Settings → Prexy on iOS) and allow it there, then reopen Prexy.

An attachment won't preview.

Previews use the system's Quick Look, so a file type macOS itself cannot preview will not preview here either. The file is still stored and still opens in its own app.

The board window feels cramped, or a settings list is cut off.

Resize the window from its edge; the board has a minimum width set by its toolbar. If a window is genuinely stuck, quitting and reopening Prexy resets its position.

Something is wrong that isn't here.

Please write: shearm@mac.com. Include your OS version and whether it happens on one device or both.

Privacy, briefly

Prexy has no backend, no analytics, no third-party SDKs and makes no network requests of its own. Your notes are on your devices and in your own iCloud account, and the developer has no access to them. The full statement is on the privacy policy page.