Shaxpir 2.1.0: Version History Tracking

Writing a novel is a job of continuous tinkering and tweaking.

You start with a rough draft, and then refine your prose, erasing and changing things, filling in details and fleshing out the architecture until your story clicks.

The true art of writing is found in the rewriting.

So it’s important that you never lose anything you’ve written — even if you deliberately change it — because you might want to find an old snippet of text someday, and incorporate it back into your latest prose.

Keeping track of versions yourself can get very complicated, very fast. Even if you make your own backups, it can quickly become impossible to find specific versions of specific chapters, from specific days in the past. DropBox is great for sharing files, but it’s really just a file-sharing protocol, not a version history.

That’s why Shaxpir keeps track of all your text-edits over time, letting you rewind each individual chapter or note back to your first writing session. You can look back at the text you wrote last week, or last month, and if you change your mind you can restore the old version.

To view the version history of any chapter or note, just click on the Show Version History button:

The left-hand navigation panel will slide away, revealing a complete history of version snapshots. You can scroll through this list to see the timestamps and a summary of changes made during each writing session. Click on any of these summaries to see the complete body of that snapshot, including the full text, concept artwork, connections, and margin comments. You can’t edit these snapshots, but you can click on the Restore This Version button (with the star icon) for any snapshot in the list.

When you restore an old snapshot, the old snapshot is simply duplicated to the top of your version history, so you won’t lose any of your more-recent edits. So even if you change your mind yet again (you fickle, fickle scribe), you can always go back to the version history and grab the overwritten text from the previous snapshot.

After you finish working with the version history, just click on the Go Back button to return to an the live text editor and continue working from the latest restored snapshot:

As always, if you use Shaxpir from multiple different devices (home and work, laptop and desktop, etc), everything will still work exactly as you’d expect. Each device communicates with the cloud and synchronizes the correct versions back to you, no matter how many times you backtrack and restore older snapshots from your version history.

One important thing to remember is that snapshots are based on writing sessions. We save your work continuously, but we only take version snapshots at the end of each writing session, so you can only restore the snapshots taken at the end of those sessions. This prevents you from having an overly cluttered version history, with a zillion tiny edits. By limiting version snapshots to session-end, you can easily walk back through your writing history and find the old versions you want.

Version Histories are available in Shaxpir 2.1.0 and above, and providing another compelling professional feature, making Shaxpir the best choice for serious writers everywhere. If you haven’t signed up yet, download it today, and enjoy a 30-day free trial, with no credit card required.