New in Ellipsus: November 2024

In October, we introduced editor settings to put you in control over smart formatting, display settings, and more. This month, we’re adding features that make it easier to mark up and edit your text in whatever way works best for your process.

(They’re also pretty. Because hey, even a minimalist editor can be a little aesthetique. 💅)

Color your text

Yes, text colors are finally here! Make your story more colorful with nine new hues—each with five shades to choose from. Use colors to:

• Differentiate between characters
• Differentiate between collaborators
• Highlight bits of text you want to revisit

Colors can be applied granularly, so you can use the full rainbow across your writing. And get those HEX codes ready—a full palette is on the way!

Use regex with find and replace

Regular expressions (AKA regex) offer a powerful and highly customizable way to search for text. Regex can make it easier to spot patterns and make large-scale changes in your text.

Slightly techy, yes, but you don’t have to be a programmer to benefit from it. You can use regex while editing to:

• Convert straight quotes into curly quotes
• Highlight all dialogue
• Identify and edit adverbs, gerunds, and passive voice

Grab a few examples from our help center to get started.

Set your dark mode preferences

In addition to manually selecting light mode or dark mode, you can set Ellipsus to follow your system preferences—so if your operating system goes from light to dark over the course of a day, Ellipsus will too.

While they’re not the sexiest updates, as a prolific Ellipsus user, these next two changes have absolutely transformed my workflow.

Leave shared documents

Some collabs are ongoing, some are short-term. If you work with enough people across enough documents, your Shared with me can accumulate clutter (not to mention your notifications center).

Now, once you’re done beta-ing or editing, you can leave a document. By default, your exit won’t be announced, but you can always use comments or chat to say farewell before departing.

Create comments that pop

The core writing crew at Ellipsus—John, Rex, and me—we’re long commenters. Suggestions, links, musings, jokes … we jam it all in that little input field.

And my goodness, trying to communicate so much without line breaks or rich text was fucking painful.

Not anymore! Decorate your comments with bold, italics, lists, links, and more. (And soooo many line breaks.)

In addition to making comments 1000x nicer, rich text support lays the technical foundation for early 2025 updates, like @-mentioning commenters.

We’re so happy to see how importing has enabled more writers to switch over to Ellipsus. Full .docx imports are still on the way, but until then, we’ve shipped a few quality-of-life improvements to make managing your imported works more pleasant.

Import moaaaar

A handful of writers have already imported more than 100 docs into Ellipsus. 🤯 We respect the commitment to centralizing your work, so we’ve shipped some improvements to streamline the process. With these updates, you can:

• Import multiple Markdown files at once.
• Import files directly into a folder.
• Import files without automatically opening them in Ellipsus.

Display non-printing characters

We’re also making it easier to clean up your docs post-import. Docs imported from another tool can look a little different in Ellipsus, generally due to our default font and spacing options. And since not all tools visually differentiate between paragraph and line breaks, Ellipsus imports might look a tad … spacious.

Head to editor settings and enable Invisible characters to show spaces, line breaks, and paragraph breaks in your doc. Then, you can manually adjust your spacing (use return / enter for a paragraph break or shift + return / shift + enter for a line break) or adjust your line height and paragraph spacing to update your doc.

All writing—and all writers—are welcome in Ellipsus, but there’s a special place in our hearts for the creative writers who’ve been quick to adopt and celebrate what we’re building. Many people have flocked to Ellipsus because they (rightfully) have concerns about how their writing might be monitored, scraped, or censored by other tools.

To make sure our stances on privacy (we’re for it), generative AI (we’re against it), and transformative works (❤️ AO3) are clear, we’ve revised our privacy policy and terms of service. Nothing’s materially changed, but the language should be much, much clearer. Here’s the gist:

• Your data is yours. We won’t access, sell, or use your personal information for nefarious purposes. Ever.
• We won’t police your content. We’re a writing tool—we don’t host published works. We strongly believe in creative expression, and you’re free to write whatever you want. (Just don’t commit crimes or use Ellipsus to harm yourself or others, pretty please.)
• We’ll always keep you in the loop. These docs are a WIP—we may update them to reflect changes to how we operate, prevent abuse, or better safeguard and serve our writers. When there are significant changes, we’ll let you know first. We want you to feel safe and confident when storing your work in Ellipsus.
  

Want to hear about the latest updates as they happen? Join our Discord to follow announcements and share your feedback.