New in Ellipsus: May 2025

As a queer-founded company building a space for our very, very gay creative community, we know how much June matters. Especially in a year where words and books are being banned, Pride Month is getting yeeted from calendars (real brave, Google), and it’s becoming clear that corporate “allies” were only in it for the likes, shares, and positive PR.

We have (lots) more to say on the topic. But to kick things off, we’ve shipped a few changes to help you celebrate Pride in style.

Celebrate with a new theme

We’re making Ellipsus a little more colorful with a new theme: Pride. Developed under the code name Gay AF, this versatile (ahem) theme is perfect when light is too bright and sepia is too warm.

… and a new snippet background

Keep those pastel vibes going when you share your writing with a new Pride-themed background.

Since lots of you have already asked: These changes are permanent. Because celebrating queer voices shouldn't be limited to one month.

Stay tuned for more thoughts and goodies (Dark Pride theme, anyone?) to drop in June.

Last month, we added document descriptions to give a bit more context to those otherwise impenetrable (ahem) doc titles. Now, we’re making that metadata work a bit harder.

When you enable view-only links, we’ll use your document description in the link preview. This should work in places like Discord, Bluesky, Tumblr (and also Slack, for the minority of you using Ellipsus for your SFW writing). Hopefully this makes the collaboration you’re doing outside of Ellipsus even smoother!

We’ve seen the posts, reblogs, and skeets (ahem)—we fear our spell check is flirting with memedom.

First, some context! We rely on hand-curated, open-source dictionaries to power our spell check—the same ones that form the basis of Libre Office’s offering. The downside is that they’re not exhaustive. So occasionally there would be some obvious misses like “orca” just … not being recognized as a real word.

We’re switching to expanded versions of these dictionaries, essentially doubling our coverage across American, Australian, British, and Canadian English.

Our work with spell check is nowhere near complete—we suppose you could call it our white whale—but should hopefully reduce some of the linguistic gaslighting we’ve been responsible for. (Yes, we know orcas are actually dolphins, not whales. But jokes!)

“Safety” is a core part of our product philosophy. To us, it means that writers can trust Ellipsus to store their writing, make it available whenever (and wherever) they need it, and keep it out of the hands of bad actors, LLMs, and those who want to curtail creative freedoms.

In May, we took a closer look at performance aspect of safety, to make sure that your changes are always saved, synced, and stored.

Syncing is more stable

Our synchronizer was struggling with the number of people writing in Ellipsus during peak hours. Our engineering team did a holistic evaluation of the problems we were facing—everything from individual lines of code to the vendors we rely on for syncing—and worked to improve this critical part of our product.

Over the past month, we fixed a few nasty bugs and optimized the synchronization process, reducing our servers’ memory and CPU usage during peak traffic hours. The result? We’ve reduced manual reconnections (i.e., via the “Saved locally” pop-up in the editor) by 72%.

Version history takes up less space

During our performance tune-up, we also took a closer look at improving version history. Our version history takes a snapshot of a draft approximately every two seconds(!) during a writing session. So prolific writers have equally prolific version histories. And due to some inefficiencies in our storage processes, the git repos hosting those version histories were becoming absolute chonkers, sometimes reaching up to 6GB. The end result? Some writers couldn’t access their history unless we manually cleaned up the storage. Bummer.

We’ve cleaned up some of our legacy code and changed how we fetch past versions (pagination FTW), so getting into a stuck state should be very, very rare. (If you do run into this, get in touch and we’ll get you unstuck in a jiffy.)

With these changes, version history will take up to 90% less storage space. So in addition to a faster experience for you, we should be able to save some extra coin each month—a real win-win!

Want to connect with a like-minded community and get the latest news on Ellipsus? Join our Discord to follow announcements and share your feedback.