A short manual for longer reading.

Lexis is small enough that you can learn it in twenty minutes and never need this manual again. We wrote it anyway, because some readers like a manual.

1 · Adding a book

Drag any .epub, .pdf, .txt, or .html file into the Lexis window. That's the whole story. Lexis copies it into your library folder (~/Lexis/Library by default), parses it once, and shelves it under "Recent."

To import a Project Gutenberg work, open the command palette (⌘ K) and type the title. Lexis fetches a clean copy and stores it locally. The book is yours from then on, online or off.

2 · Reading

Reading is the default mode. There is no toolbar — the page is the interface. Move with your space bar, your arrow keys, or the trackpad. The reading line follows your gaze if you turn that on (⌥ L); most readers turn it off.

To change the typography for a book, open the Plate with ⌘ ;. You can choose a typeface, a measure, a leading, and a paper. Your choices are remembered per book — Middlemarch can be Lora 18/30 on cream while The Iliad is Cardo 20/32 on parchment, and Lexis will not get them confused.

3 · Annotation

Select a passage and any of three things appear in the margin: a highlight (H), a note (N), or a question (?). All three live in the margin, not as pop-ups. The margin is the point. The book stays the book.

Notes accept Markdown, math (LaTeX between $…$), and links to other passages — type [[ and Lexis suggests anchors from your library. A note linked to two books knits them together permanently; you can read either one and see the link from the other.

4 · Looking things up

Select a word and press D for the dictionary, E for an etymology, T to translate, or R to consult research (arXiv + OpenAlex). All four are inline; none of them take you out of the book.

Bibliographic notes are stored alongside the citation. If a paper changes a citation, Lexis quietly updates yours and shows you the diff.

5 · Finding things again

⌘ F finds in the current book. ⌘ ⇧ F finds across the whole library, and the results are ranked by how recently you read in that book — your reading life is the index. ⌘ K opens the command palette, which can also jump to any annotation, page, or chapter by name.

6 · Sharing a passage

Right-click a passage and choose Excerpt as .lex. Lexis exports a small file containing the passage, your annotation, and the citation. Send it by email; the recipient does not need Lexis to read it (any text editor will do), but if they have Lexis it opens, in their library, exactly where it would have been in yours. See the .lex specification.

To share an entire reading — book + your margins — export it as .lexis. It is a sealed envelope of your reading: the text you read, the marks you made, the order you made them in.

7 · Backup & sync

Your library is a folder. Back it up the way you back up any other folder: Time Machine, rsync, an external disk, a thumb drive in a desk drawer. We deliberately did not invent our own cloud.

For sync between machines, point Lexis at any folder you already sync — iCloud Drive, Dropbox, a Syncthing volume, an SMB share. Lexis writes plain files; the conflict resolution is the file system's, not ours, and that is on purpose.

8 · Privacy

Lexis does not phone home. There is no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporter, and no "anonymous usage statistics." When the app updates, it asks. When something breaks, you write to support and we figure it out together. See our privacy haiku.

9 · Trouble

The most common trouble is a misformatted EPUB. Lexis ships with a tiny tool, lexis-mend, that you can run on a stubborn book to repair it. The tool runs locally; it never uploads anything anywhere.

Anything else, write us at support@lexisreader.app. A real person reads it.

10 · The keyboard

A complete map of every shortcut lives on its own page: the keyboard map.

Continue: Keyboard map ›  ·  .lex specification ›  ·  Changelog ›