Plain Text, Never a Trap
When covering high-stakes stories, you can never afford to have your notes held hostage inside a closed format. On the Mac, Prexy mirrors every story to an open folder of standard Markdown files.
📂 A Plain Copy on Disk, Kept Current
Every story is written out as a TextBundle — a folder holding the story as text.md, exactly as you wrote it, plus any files you attached. Open it in VS Code, Obsidian, Nova or any text editor. The copy is one-way: Prexy updates it every time you save, and never reads it back, so an edit made on disk won't change the story in Prexy.
🏷️ Metadata Beside the Prose, Not In It
The slug, beat, status and dates live in the bundle's info.json, so the Markdown stays just your writing:
budget-vote-count.textbundle/
text.md Whip count for Thursday's floor vote...
info.json { "com.mikeshear.storydesk": { "slug": "budget-vote-count",
"beat": "politics", "status": "inProgress",
"created": "…", "modified": "2026-09-18T11:42:00Z" }, … }
assets/ whip-sheet.pdf
🛡️ Git-Friendly & Backed Up Everywhere
Because stories exist as plain text files, you can version control your entire reporting notebook with Git, back it up with Time Machine or encrypted off-site archives, and grep across years of past reporting in milliseconds.