Textoshop: An intelligent text editor with interactions inspired by drawing software

Online Demo / How to build / Publication (CHI'25)

Textoshop ("Photoshop for text") is a system that explores how interactions inspired by drawing software can help edit text. For instance:

• Text can be lengthened or shortened by dragging its edges. Similarly, text can be moved around and rotated to change the order of the words.
• Tools help edit the text. For instance, the smudge tool can paraphrase a passage, the eraser tool can remove words while keeping the text coherent, and the tone brush can change the tone.
• A tone picker allows exploring thousands of tone nuances by navigating a 2D space.
• Boolean operations can be used to compose sentences by combining, intersecting, or subtracting ideas or phrases.
• Text layers allow structuring, displaying, and editing text in independent views.

Under the hood, Textoshop uses a large language model (LLM) to power many of these interactions. For more details, see the accompanying research paper.

How to build and run

The code is written in TypeScript and uses React and Vite. To build and run the code, you will need to have Node.js installed on your machine. You can download it here. First install the dependencies:

npm install

Then build the code:

npm run dev

How to use?

After entering your OpenAI API key, you can test Textoshop using the shortcuts or you can run the study. Note that the system was tested and developped for recent versions of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

How to get an OpenAI API key?

Because Textoshop relies on the OpenAI API, you will need a key to make it work. You will need an account properly configured, see here for more info. Your key is never stored and the application runs locally and sends requests to the OpenAI API only.

Can I try without an API key?

The systen depends on the OpenAI API to work. If you enter an incorrect key, you will still be able to go through the study but executing prompts will yield an error.

Where are the video tutorials?

From the launcher, you can start the study to see the exact ordering and video tutorials participants went through. Alternatively, you can go in the public/videos to review all the video tutorials.

Publication

Damien Masson, Young-Ho Kim, and Fanny Chevalier. 2025. Textoshop: Interactions Inspired by Drawing Software to Facilitate Text Editing. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25) 10.1145/3706598.3713862

You can also find the paper on arXiv.