It’ll be a shame if it goes away. It was solid software designed for the Macintosh (not just software that happened to run on the Mac thanks to Electron or the like.) I don’t use it much, since I don’t write much anymore, but it was always pleasant to use (unlike Word) and I always found all the features I wanted and more.
Because it’s such a full-featured product, it would be a real shame for the codebase to be abandoned.
Most of those apps are not word processors as such. A few of them are text editors (TextEdit, Byword, iA Writer), Scrivener and Ulysses are a different type of app, there are two apps for screenwriting, and Craft is an app that works with a lot more than just words. Pure word processors are quite limited on the Mac: Word, Pages, Mellel, Nisus Writer, and I don’t think there are any other serious contenders. It’s hard to compete in a space that is dominated by Word, and where Google Docs is the method of choice for people needing word processor features. (I wouldn’t call it a Mac word processor, since it’s web-only.)
The best editor of a bad lot for editing TeX is Texifier née Texpad. Supposedly it’s still under development, and it’s usable as a front end to a real TeX backend. But its big selling point is its own WYSIWYG engine, which has a horrible bug for Unicode handling which I filed a decade or so ago, with no progress so far.
Is anyone else up for a Kickstarter, on that inevitable day when Apple breaks backward compatibility, to pay for changes to make it run on the latest MacOS? (I first bought Nisus in 1989, and used it as the first stage in rewriting my failed doctoral thesis, which eventually became “A Variant of Church’s Set Theory with a Universal Set in which the Singleton Function is a Set” (abridged), in Logique et Analyse, Vol 59, No 233 (2016).)
Thanks for the info Joe. I noticed that the website was down and I wondered about the app. It is sad that its disappearance was so little noticed.
The category of commercial word processing seems to have been decimated by text processors for most uses, by free apps like Pages on the low end, and by Microsoft for the bloated do-everything high end that corporate sales support.
Most people never needed feature rich, increasingly complicated, ribbon-iconed processors instead of basic frictionless writing tools. That’s something even Apple hasn’t figured out, given the slightly slow, clunky implementation of Pages in iCloud, and the app’s included layout functions that are increasingly irrelevant to modern use (Business card template? Drop-in iMovie functionality?)
If Nisus does start glitching with new macOS versions, it will be hard to find another word processing app with a style-aware regex engine. Maybe you could hack something with Word’s VBA macros - but even then the Mac version of Word has bowlderized functionality and lacks VBScript/COM, I believe. On Mac I suspect you’d need to complement a replacement word processor with something like BBEdit which supports regex and style natively.
I wonder what Nisus’ development toolchain is like these days?
I am not a Mac software developer, but have worked on making changes to old software products before. What I learned is that it takes active development work to keep your project up-to-date with the requirements of current compilers, SDKs, and development systems. If you don’t, it becomes harder and harder to build the product without errors.
If Nisus has had the software in a maintenance only mode, where they only make critical fixes, they may be at the point where the only way to build it is using some machine running a really old version of OS X. And at some point it won’t be feasible at all, without a lot of reengineering.
Unrelated, but related … not a Nisus user, but well familiar with the name. What obviously, based on its loyal base, is a niche but fine product, is representative of too many good programs that are unable to survive either because there is no one to keep it alive, or no motive (i.e., financing) to get someone new to act as steward.
For me, email clients have been the bane of my existence. I hate the interface of both Thunderbird and GMail. I pine — no pun intended — for Eudora, which went by the wayside how long ago? I switched to Powermail — and happily paid for it — but it, too, faced an eventual death. I’m still waiting for the funeral for Postbox; I suppose I’ll eventually have to try EM Client and see if they haven’t mucked it up too much. I also still miss the Chimera/Camino browser. I dumped Quicken for Moneyspire, which now has a banner across the top reminding me I’m no longer receiving upgrades because I haven’t tithed the company. Guess I’ve always bet on the wrong horse, so to speak.
As nihilistic as this sounds, I can only hope I don’t live to see the day when all software is about unending upgrades, unnecessary bells and whistles, and ridiculous annual fees.
Mellel does incorporate regular expressions find/replace, though I’m sure it’s not nearly as extensive as Nisus. I’ve used regex in both, but only minimally.
Joe…given your original post in this thread and the apparent impending death of the app…I’m sure you’re already researching alternatives in the event it becomes abandonware. It will likely continue to work for awhile anyway but getting a head start on what to use next seems wise.
This is only the case if you are stuck using iOS or iPadOS. Despite the recent improvements to iPadOS, I still consider the Mac to be a much better platform for TeX/LaTeX. An excellent free TeX environment for TeX is TeXshop. I have used Texpad in all its recent incarnations and it is buggy and awkward to use. TeXshop is much better, and, despite being a free app, is frequently updated. Moreover, there is a superb user group MaxOSX-TeX which is constantly monitored and provides timely answers to most problems with the app. Highly recommended.
To be sure, I have spent a great deal of time looking at alternatives for Take Control Books. There are several apps that come close except that they’re missing one or two crucial features. The only thing I’ve found that could plausibly meet our particular needs is InDesign (likely in combination with InCopy). It’s really heavy (and expensive) for what we need, and would require a fair bit of customization and scripting work, but it could get the job done. Keep in mind, of course, that our needs are rather idiosyncratic. Long, complex documents can be written and published using lots of different apps. It all depends on one’s specific requirements.
When Take Control Books started back in 2003, we used Word. After several years during which we all struggled and swore a lot, we switched to Pages. After several more years in which we struggled with, and swore about, different things, we switched to Nisus Writer, which let us do everything we needed with only occasional griping about bugs. Pages has improved since we stopped using it, but not in the ways we care about. All the others (Mellel, Zoho Writer, Scrivener, Affinity Publisher, and half a dozen or so others I tried) have, unfortunately, one or more shortcomings that make them inappropriate for us. Which, again, is not to say they might not be great alternatives for other people!
7 posts were split to a new topic: Word processors that support footnotes
Thank you for the depressing update. I have been using NisusWriter for long enough that I remember using Joe’s book about it, all those decades ago. And I still use it, and all of its features – the macros, the GREP, the advanced book tools (cross-references, indexing, etc.) I’ve never heard of a comparable program; I don’t think there is one. And I have two books currently in process in it.
Obviously there isn’t much I can do to maintain it. But I would contribute to a Kickstarter, or equivalent, to help keep it alive.
FWIW, I have for years been using BBEdit as my word processor. It’s surprisingly pleasant and non-geeky if you simply tweak the prefs (and I love having all the powerful GREP and scripting tools).
TWEAKING BBEDIT TO BE LESS DAUNTING TO WRITERS:
Prefs: Appearance
Deselect line numbers and gutter
Prefs: Application
Deselect “Always Show Full Paths in Open Recent Menu
Select “When Bbedit Becomes Active, New Text Document”
Prefs: Editing
“Show Text Completions Only Manually”
Deselect “Display Instances of Selected Text
Prefs: Editor Defaults
Select “Softwrap Text to: Character Width: 70 (if you want to see more text per line, try 80).
Default Font: I like Optima Regular 14
Prefs: Printing
Deselect “Print Page Headers”
Deselect “Print Full Pathname”
Deselect “Print Line Numbers”
Deselect “Print Color Syntax”
Unfortunately, we’re stuck with either time stamp or “date saved” stamp
Prefs: Text Files
Select “Make Backup Before Saving”
Select “Keep Historical Backgrounds”
Prefs: menus and shortcuts
Choose “Simple Menus” (button at lower left)
Deselect #!,
View Menu
Hide Navigation Bar
Text Display: Hide Page Guide
Text Display: Hide Gutter
Then, if you ever need WYSIWYG, use BBEdit with Marked 2 app. This is also the solution if you need to print out with full styling.
oh well…I always kept my Nisus up to date since MacOS 8 times. But I don’t depend on it like you. Maybe you could look into virtualization if it will break with upcoming MacOS updates. I used to do work for people with files written with long outdated software versions, and always used virtual machines. Not ideal, but if your workflow in Nisus is more or less complete it could still work for a long time.
It’s no problem for me, personally, to use a virtualized environment if it ever comes to that. However, all our authors and editors have to use Nisus Writer, and asking them all to do that would be a problem.
I am old enough to remember the pleasure of using the Write Now word processor on my Mac Plus and the pain of trying (unsuccessfully) to find an equally intuitive replacement when it was discontinued. My needs are not as complex or specific as those of Take Control, but having used both Word and Pages, I find Nisus’s interface to be far more user-friendly. I really hope there will be a viable path forward for it.
Has anyone reached out to Charles Jolley, who developed Okito Composer (on which Nisus Writer Express and Nisus Writer Pro were based)? According to ChatGPT: “Charles Jolley is now primarily operating as an investor and startup mentor/partner, rather than directly developing applications as he did with earlier software. His current focus is on investment and growth consultancy through Tinman Group and related advisory roles.”
The Tinman Group is apparently “a firm that focuses on scaling profitable companies with AI, remote work, and health tech,” and although Nisus probably no longer qualifies as a “profitable company,” Jolley might have an emotional attachment to Nisus and want to see it survive. (I know I do!)
I’ve started using Nisus Writer about 30 years ago, reading about it in one of Adam’s books, and immediately loved it. It’s still my main word processor, although I do use Pages sometimes. Nisus Writer is still a lot faster, especially when working with documents with lots of pages.
I was so glad when Nisus Writer Pro got most (if not all) its functionality back, after the switch to Intel Macs and happy again when it survived in it’s present form, my switch to Apple silicon.
It did occasionally surprised me that there were hardly any paid updates for Nisus Writer Pro, as there are for apps like GraphicConverter or BBEdit, but never having developed power user levels in word processing, I never really needed function upgrades and hardly ran into bugs.
Although I don’t expect having much trouble finding a replacement,as my word processing needs aren’t that high, I sincerely hope I can keep using Nisus Writer Pro for a long time and will miss it dearly when I can’t anymore.
There are some alternatives to LaTeX, being Markdown and now Quarto. These are much simpler languages which also allow embedding LaTeX. The easiest way to use them is through RStudio, which is free, and includes a visual editor for Quarto. As the Quarto files are plain text you could do some things in BBEdit.