Documentation

Installing

1. Download doxie and open doxie.dmg.
2. Drag doxie to the Applications folder.
3. Open doxie from Applications. A paw 🐾 appears in the menu bar; doxie has no Dock icon.

doxie is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens with a double-click.

On first launch, a short welcome guide shows how capturing works and lets you pick your shortcut and turn on Launch at login. You can reopen it any time from 🐾 → Welcome Guide.

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple silicon or Intel.

Capturing notes

Press ⌥Space in any app. A pixel dachshund appears, and its body is the text field. It grows as you type, and its tail wags faster while you write.

• ⌘S saves the note and closes the dachshund. Prefer ⌘↩? Switch it under Settings → Capture → Save a note with.
• Esc or clicking elsewhere closes it and keeps your draft. The draft survives even quitting doxie, and it's only cleared once the note is saved.
• The app you were in stays in front, so you can carry on right where you were.

The first line of a note is its title. You can change the shortcut under 🐾 → Settings… → Capture, and also open the dachshund from 🐾 → New Note.

Reminders

Start a note with /remind and when, then the note:

/remind tomorrow 9:00 call the vet

While you type, the time appears under the dachshund, so you can check it before saving. /r works too. doxie understands English and German:

A day without a time means 9:00.

You can also click the bell 🔔 at the top of an open note (⇧⌘R), or right-click a note → Remind Me.

When it's time

• The paw 🐾 in the menu bar gets an orange dot, and its menu shows Reminders Due, which opens them.
• A notification appears with Done and Later (in 10 minutes, in 1 hour, tomorrow). Click it to open the note.
• The note's dog in the park rings a little bell, and the note shows a highlighted 🔔 badge in the list.
• The Reminders tab lists every note with a reminder, the next one first.

The first time you set a reminder, macOS asks whether doxie may show notifications. You can check this under Settings → Reminders.

Repeating reminders Pro

/remind every monday 8:00 standup, daily 7:30, weekdays 9am, jeden Montag, täglich or monatlich. You can also pick Repeat in the bell's menu. Done moves the reminder to its next time, and Later doesn't change the rhythm.

Checklists

Write tasks as - [ ] milk, or select some lines in a note and press ⇧⌘L to turn them into a checklist (press it again to turn them back). In the editor every task shows a checkbox: click it to tick the task off, and it's struck through. ⌘Z undoes it.

On the home page, a To-dos column beside your notes (above them in a narrow window) collects the open tasks of all your notes, grouped by note. Tick them off right there; a ticked task stays struck through until you close the window, so you can untick it. Click a note's name to open it. The column only appears while some note has tasks.

The notes list shows how far along a checklist is, for example ☑ 2/5. With Pro, /todo in the dachshund turns every line of a new note into a task.

The note stays plain Markdown (- [x] milk when done), exactly like Obsidian's tasks.

Tags

Write #work, #idea or nested tags like #work/meeting anywhere in a note. Tags work like in Obsidian:

• Upper and lower case don't matter.
• A tag needs at least one letter, so #42 isn't a tag.
• # Heading and page#anchor aren't tags.
• Filtering by #work also shows notes tagged #work/meeting.

Searches can mix words and tags, for example #work invoice.

Tags as folders

On the home page, tags sit in a row below the tabs. Nested tags fold under their parent like folders: click ▸ next to #work to show meeting and ideas. Right-click a tag → Pin Tag to keep it at the front of the row.

Quick search

Press ⌥⇧Space from anywhere for a compact list of your notes, newest first. Type words or #tags to filter.

Clipboard

Pasting into the dachshund (⌘V) inserts plain text. Links stay links, and files copied in Finder paste as their full paths.

Save clipboard to inbox stores whatever you copied as a new note without opening anything. Give it a shortcut under Settings → Capture (it's off by default), or use 🐾 → Save Clipboard to Inbox. The paw briefly shows a checkmark, or an ✕ if the clipboard had no text. Pressing it twice doesn't create a duplicate.

From other apps

Save to doxie: select text in any app (Safari, Mail, Notes…), right-click and choose Services → Save to doxie. It becomes a new note without opening anything, and the paw briefly shows a checkmark. It works for links and for files selected in Finder too (as their paths). To give it a shortcut: System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Services → Text → Save to doxie. If it doesn't show up right after installing, log out and back in once.

doxie:// links let launchers like Raycast or Alfred, bookmarklets and scripts talk to doxie:

Encode the text for a URL (spaces as %20, line breaks as %0A). In the Terminal: open "doxie://new?text=hello".

The home page

Open it from 🐾 → Open Inbox, or by opening doxie again from Finder or Spotlight.

The dog park

Your ten newest notes play in the park, one dachshund per note. They wander around the pond, gallop, sniff, dig and nap.

• Hover a dog to see its note's title, and click it to open the note.
• Each dog looks like the dachshund did when you wrote its note: same coat, same accessory. Notes written with the plain dog get a coat per first tag, so notes that share a tag look alike.
• Pinned notes wear a little gold crown, and new notes run in from the edge.
• While you search or filter, only the matching dogs stay bright.
• The sign shows your note count and your streak: the days in a row you've written at least one note.

The park only moves while doxie's window is in front, so it costs nothing in the background.

Your notes

Below the park is the list of notes, each with its little dog. Use the tabs to show All, Pinned, Reminders, Archive or a single #tag (click the tag again to go back to All), or search with the field in the toolbar. Show all expands the list.

Click a note to edit it; changes are saved as you type. Hover a note for quick buttons to pin, archive or delete it, or right-click it for everything (including copy and reminders). In an open note, the same buttons sit at the top.

• Pinned notes stay on top.
• Archived notes leave All, the tags and quick search, but are never deleted. Find them under Archive.

Markdown and Obsidian

doxie can write every note as a Markdown file into a folder, for example the inbox folder of your Obsidian vault.

1. Open Settings → Export Targets → Add Target → Markdown Folder… and pick the folder.
2. New and edited notes are sent automatically (the switch on the right). Use … → Send All Notes Now to export the notes you already have.

Each note becomes YYYY-MM-DD HHmm Title.md with front matter (id, created, updated, source, tags, and remind / repeat for notes with a reminder), which Obsidian reads natively.

Your files are safe

• One file per note. Renaming a file or changing the note's title never creates a duplicate.
• Your edits win. If you changed a file elsewhere, doxie doesn't overwrite it and tells you why under Settings → Sync. Move or delete the file to export the note again.
• Other files are left alone. doxie only writes the folder's top level, never subfolders or .obsidian, and never deletes a file, even when you delete the note.

Free includes one Markdown folder for all notes. With Pro you can add as many targets as you like and give each a tag filter (… → Tag Filter…), for example #work to your work vault and #idea to Notion.

Notion Pro

1. Create an internal integration at notion.so/my-integrations and copy its secret.
2. In Notion, open the database for your notes → ••• → Connections → add your integration.
3. In doxie, open Settings → Notion, paste the secret and click Connect. The secret is stored in your Mac's keychain.
4. Under Export Targets → Add Target → Notion Database…, pick the database.

Each note becomes a page. The first line is its title, and the rest becomes Notion blocks: headings, lists, to-dos, quotes and code. To fill in tags and dates, add a multi-select property named Tags and a date property named Created to the database.

doxie sends a note 3 seconds after you stop typing. If you're offline, it tries again later on its own. Pages you edited or deleted in Notion are never overwritten or recreated.

Sync between Macs Pro

Turn on Sync notes between my Macs under Settings → Sync Between Macs, on each Mac. Notes are kept in iCloud Drive › Doxie Sync; under Change you can pick another synced folder, such as Dropbox.

• Notes from all your Macs are merged. Turning sync on never replaces anything.
• The latest change wins, for text, pins, archiving and deleting.
• If the same note was changed on two Macs before they synced, both versions are kept. The second one is a separate note tagged #conflict.
• Set up export targets on one Mac only, so two Macs don't write the same files.

Capture actions Pro

Type a command at the start of a note:

Commands combine, for example /pin /todo call the vet or /pin /remind friday pay rent. While you type #ta…, matching tags appear under the dog, and Tab completes the first one. Without Pro, commands are saved as plain text.

Designs and park themes Pro

Under Settings → Design you can dress up your dachshund:

• Coats: Classic Red, Black & Tan, Dapple, Chocolate, Cream.
• Accessories: scarf, party hat, glasses, bow tie, and cowboy hat with boots.
• Doze off: the dog falls asleep after 10 seconds without typing.
• Park & frame: Meadow (free), Autumn, Snow and Night, each with its own scenery, animations and frame.

Every note remembers the look it was written with, so your park fills up with different dogs. You can try any look in the preview without Pro.

Doxie Pro and your license

Doxie Pro is a one-time purchase for up to 3 Macs, with no subscription. Payment and licensing are handled by Lemon Squeezy.

1. Buy Doxie Pro on the home page. Your license key arrives by email.
2. In doxie, open Settings → Doxie Pro, paste the key under License Key and click Activate.

• Moving to another Mac: click Deactivate on This Mac to free the activation, then activate on the new Mac.
• Offline: doxie checks the license once a day. If it can't reach the server, Pro keeps working for 180 days.
• Without Pro nothing is lost: your notes, exports and settings stay. Pro features just pause.

Updates

doxie checks for updates once a day and asks before installing. You can turn this off under Settings → Updates, and check by hand with 🐾 → Check for Updates….

Your data

Notes are stored on your Mac in ~/Library/Application Support/doxie/doxie.sqlite. Settings → Storage → Show in Finder opens the folder. doxie has no account and no servers.

• Backups: Settings → Storage → Export Backup… saves all your notes (archived ones too) in one file. Restore… brings back notes that are missing or were deleted, and never overwrites a newer version or removes anything.
• Before updating its database to a new format, doxie saves a copy next to it (doxie.sqlite.backup-…).
• Your Mac's Time Machine backs up the folder like any other.
• To uninstall, quit doxie and move it to the Trash. To also delete your notes, delete the folder above. This can't be undone.

See the privacy policy for everything doxie sends over the network.

Keyboard shortcuts

The three global shortcuts can be changed under Settings → Capture.

Troubleshooting