October and November are big months for writers—and for the people building tools for writers! We shipped a whole slew of features and updates, from how you share your work, to how collaboration happens on small (but mighty) screens, to how the page looks when it matches the voice in your head.
Plus new themes, new templates, fresh blog posts, and a few long-overdue delights… it’s been a lot (in the best way).
Invite by link
There’s a new way to share your docs: no email invites required. You can now generate a shareable link with a specific permissions role attached (Can View, Can Comment, Can Edit, and more), and share it anywhere.
Here’s how it works:
- Open the Collaborators panel in your doc
- Click + Invite new
- Choose the role you want anyone with the link to have
- Select Invite by link to generate your custom link
Want to share different access levels with different groups? You can create as many links as you’d like—one for readers, one for beta readers, one for your co-author who only edits at 4AM… a whole flock of hungry editors eager to tear into your draft, or a coven of readers haunting your prose—go forth, and blast your work into the void.
And if you don’t want your WIP links to float around forever, you can set them to expire after a certain amount of time. Visit the Link settings in the Share by link section of the Collaborators panel to set an expiration date.
A better way to collab on mobile
Writing together happens everywhere: on the train, waiting in line for coffee, procrastinating in class, or half-awake on the couch with your phone balanced precariously on a pillow...
So we rebuilt comments on mobile from the ground up to make collaborating a lot easier.
On mobile, comments now open in a bottom sheet to quickly move through threads without losing your place in the doc. You can flip through comments easily using the arrows at the top of the sheet.
If you want the bigger picture, View all comments pulls every thread into a single scrollable list. You can also filter by collaborator when you’re hunting for specific feedback (on mobile or desktop).
Replies got a rethink too. They now open full-screen, with the input bar anchored at the bottom, so you can read through the conversation while you’re typing.
Sometimes words fail (so we added GIFs)
When the ship is shipping so hard that only a primal scream will do… there’s a GIF for that.
Comments now support GIFs via Giphy. Drop one directly into a comment or reply, with or without text. Celebrate, panic, commiserate, or communicate an entire emotional arc in a few seconds. Cue chaos (affectionate).
Eight new themes
October and November brought not one, but two theme drops!
Cozy, witchy, autumnal
For Spooky Season, we brought a little warmth and magic to your dash:
🍁 Maple: golden-hour glow and candy corn
🎃 Pumpkin Spice: rainy windowpanes and seriously thick novels
🔮 Wicked Fog: violet haze, spellcraft, cauldron smoke
☕️ Fig Espresso: dark roast and scheming by candlelight
A little nostalgia, plus a future worth building
It’s no secret that we all miss the Old Internet (and the weird, human, stubborn corners of it that still exist). So we shipped four visions of the future we were promised… and the one we’re still writing ourselves:
🫧 Aero: the dream of the Good Internet is alive in Ellipsus
💾 Retrograde: a/s/l?? Our boi Clippy lives forever in our hearts
❤️ Kudos: we’ve seen some incredible AO3 skins made from Ellipsus themes, so… why not return the favor. Iykyk.
⛓️💥 Wasteland: dystopian blues, but this time… we’re gonna make it 🤝
As always, themes are about making your space feel like you—we’re always taking suggestions over on our Discord!
Granular styling, finally
One of the most requested features since Ellipsus began, and it’s finally here: granular styling.
You can now format individual words, phrases, punctuation, or paragraphs with precision. Fonts, sizes, spacing, line height, letter and word spacing, emphasis, color—each can be applied exactly where you want it, without forcing changes across your entire document. Read all about it over on the Help Center!
Styling also carries over into Snippets, so your voice stays consistent when you share it.
Templates, blog posts, and big ol' projects
For anyone tackling long-form projects, we wanted to meet those goals head-on, so we shipped three new in-tool templates for planning your monster drafts:
You can read more about them over on the blog.
Also the blog, we also explored what it means to sustain writing and plan for the long haul, with pieces like Getting into the Space of Writing and The Art of Long-Form: How to Write Everyday. And we took a hard look at The End of NaNo (as We Know It)—NaNoWriMo’s public endorsement of generative AI, the fallout that followed… and what comes next for the community.
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.