Feature Ideas

The current right-side menu allows a user only to have one of said menus open at a given time, and I currently find this very tedious when switching between outline and format, which I do quite often because of how I like to organize longer pieces. It would be incredibly convenient to be able to be able to have more than one menu open at the same time, or at least make switching between them faster (ie having keyboard shortcuts, or small buttons like the light/dark mode toggle at the bottom of each menu, so that you don't have to go back to the main menu every single time) A different way to implement this would be to add the left-side draft menu to the list of right-side menus, and allow users to choose which menus they want to open on both sides of the screen, which would let a user like me have both outline and format open while working on a draft. This idea is inspired by various graphic design programs such as Photoshop and Medibang, where the user can drag and drop different menus into different places, including on top of each other, where then those menus are more quickly accessible and customizable to the user. A simplified version of that sort of functionality would make navigating and editing a draft much more streamlined.

One of the benefits to typewriting is slowness. It forces the brain to slow down and further develop thoughts. What I enjoy about handwriting and typewriting is that I have to choose the words I put down carefully. I can change them afterward, but the words themselves are more of an investment, and that helps me to stay focused on quality. Rather than fussily arranging poor writing into mediocre, I am forced to write mediocre at the start, in hopes that draft #2 writes even better. What I dislike about hand and type writing is the hand pain and difficulty of organization that it allows. My proposal is that you create a mode (typewriter mode) in which you can only type slowly. It is not that the words appear slowly, it is that while in typewriter mode, they cannot appear at a rate greater than that of each key being pressed individually. Therefore, they do not show up all at once etc. like in a lagging computer. Instead, only one can be pressed within x time, to mimic the effort individual key presses take on a typewriter. I think it would make sense, however, to keep cursor and maybe backspace at full speed, with the option of backspace only being a strike-through. After all, the goal is not to impede the writer, it is to make them focus on why they write exactly what they write.

The one thing I wish I could do is find where I finished writing without scrolling through the whole doc on mobile! Maybe there's a way and I missed it? Anyway apart from that I absolutely love this app, I have to do most of my writing on mobile and this works super well for that. Cheers!

This is useful for longer docs, especially on mobile, but I would love to not have to scroll from the very beginning every time I open up a document, but instead have a button to scroll to the bottom, or just automatically be where I last left off. It's kind of annoying to have to go back to where I was if I change apps or close the screen for a bit.

We can create drafts of the main work, but there's no option to split a single, larger work into chapters (that we can then make drafts of) so that we can work and edit chapter-by-chapter.

I always, always use the same formatting for all my documents. I like my headers a specific, way, I like my body font justified, etc. It would be really nice to have a way to set your personalized default fonts, alignment, preferences so I don't have to reformat all the time.

Allow writers to manage custom dictionaries to include / exclude specific words from spell check.

One of the things I really value about GDocs is that you can invite someone to make "suggestions," which lets them edit the document but puts those edits in a different color, so they're obvious at a glance. It would be really nice to have that be an option here, so I can see where the edits are, what they are, and who made them before I go to merge my drafts. Ideally this would be optional, and could be turned off (for 100% collaborative documents with no real "owner"), on, or on for guest editors but NOT the owner (for instance, when you have multiple beta readers working in the same draft).

✅ Support writing offline 🚧 Support offline navigation 🚧 Support offline merging 🚧 Support offline version history 🚧 Support offline doc / draft creation

Add an archive folder/section where completed/published work can be moved to for preserving. I find my list of works is really cluttered and it's strangely demoralising seeing works I know I finished in with "under construction" work.

While looking for a Google alternative, I signed up for Scrivener. One of the features on that program is the fact that the document itself can be a folder in the sense that you create a new page/section, write the chapter, and you can drag and drop it via the outline into different places of the story. So much easier for later draft editing, especially for pacing/story flow.

It would be really nice to be able to embed images in the documents. I do a lot of technical writing for our company blog and we often use images to help illustrate ideas we are trying to explain

I would love to have the concept of pages in Ellipsus. When editing a big work, I want to refer to its page number—it makes it easier to find a passage and pick up where you left off. When exporting into PDF and printing my work, I want to adjust the margins and preview it before exporting—this saves me time and gives me control over the layout (we love aesthetics, right?).

An option to share a document with another user with strictly commenting permissions rather than commenting and editing permissions would be awesome.

I (and many writers I know) appreciate having a native PC app. For me, it allows me to work without having reliable internet and push/share changes once I am back online. It also is beneficial to have an app that lives in my toolbar that I can open that doesn't have the option for me to get sidetracked by search windows I'd forgotten about, impulsive whims, etc. It creates a more seamless work experience all around.