Introducing Shaxpir 5.0
Benji Smith
Apr 15, 2025
This is a big release — a long long time in the making — and I'm thrilled to share it with you today! Get started by signing up today, and you'll get a 7-day free trial of Shaxpir Pro!
Shaxpir for the Browser
The biggest new feature of this release is our new Web App with Cloud Sync!
Shaxpir is now available in your favorite browser, at:
Previous versions of Shaxpir required you to download and install a desktop application for Windows or Mac, which is great for offline writing, but not as great for being able to access your writing anywhere, anytime.
With Shaxpir 5, you can log into your account from any device with any browser!
The Desktop App with Offline Mode is still around (and better than ever!) but it will become an exclusive feature of our paid Shaxpir Pro plans, starting on May 1, 2025. After that date, Shaxpir Free subscribers will only be able to use the browser version.
Linguistic Highlighting
This release includes a complete overhaul to our Linguistic Highlighting features. You can use our highlighters to explore and visualize the linguistics of your writing style, including vividness, sentiment, rhyming words, alliteration, helping verbs, adverbs and prepositions.
With these linguistic highlighters, Shaxpir helps you write engaging prose, by giving you linguistic superpowers to see the impact of your word choices, in bold vivid color!
Emotional Journey
What if you could see the ups and downs of your character's entire emotional story arc?
Shaxpir’s new Emotional Journey panel uses sentiment analysis to tally up all the positive and negative words on every page of your manuscript, and then plots those ups and downs on a chart, so that you can find the moments in your story where your characters experience the deepest hardships, and carefully craft how the tables turn when they finally overcome those challenges.
Then, with the click of a button, you can see the specific words that contributed to the greatest upward and downward movement on that emotional journey.
Images in Flowing Text
You've always been able to include concept artwork in the margins of your World-Building Notebook, but with Shaxpir 5, we've finally addressed one of our customers’ most common requests: including images (and captions!) in the body of the manuscript text.
Overhauled Sync Engine
We began deploying an updated sync protocol with the 2023 release of Shaxpir 4.6, and today's release includes a huge amount of engineering effort to refine and perfect that new sync experience.
Older versions of Shaxpir (before 4.6) operated by performing a once-a-minute exchange, transferring updated versions back and forth between the app and the server. But with today's updated sync engine, synchronization is continuous with every keystroke and mouse click. The result is a more robust and reliable realtime protocol that just gets out of your way, and lets you write!
Lots of Bug Fixes and UX Improvements
We fixed tons of annoying bugs, especially with EPUB and DOCX exports, and we made dozens of subtle improvements to the graphic design and user experience, all throughout the platform.
We hope you love it!