This is precisely why I made the decision to keep all my writing in plain ascii text, committed to a git repo, pushed to a local Forgejo instance which replicates to Github / GitLab & Codeberg. I will never lose data and I will never be locked into a tool with a proprietary file format ever again. I started with ViM / Neovim but have since migrated to Emacs since Org-Mode is so magical. I write all things in Org and export to a variety of formats including PDF, HTML/CSS, ODT / DOCX although I’ve had to sometimes fall back on pandoc for complex DOCX but it was easy with Emacs.
Emacs is used by more than academic researchers or developers. Emacs is not merely an editor, it’s a LISP REPL, a LISP virtual machine if you will. It is an alternative user interface to computing, replacing the terminal. The editor is just included by default. The real power is in LISP and once you wrap your head around it; it will change your life. You can make Emacs work the way you want it to work. You literally bend Emacs to your will instead of adapting to a carved in stone closed source software. Whatever your workflow Emacs can make it happen. A very large number of packages written by 3rd parties are available. Because it’s open source you have access to EVERYTHING.
There’s an included Introduction to Programming Emacs Lisp – Robert J. Chassell that is very well written and easy to understand. LISP is simpler than other languages but still retains considerable power. Many newer languages borrowed features and capabilities from LISP. MIT still teaches LISP in early computer science / engineering courses.
GNU Emacs runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, Windows (WSL2), Chromebooks, Android (new), and any of the BSD flavors. Changing computing since 1983.
On macOS I highly recommend using the Homebrew Emacs-Plus version of Emacs.
There’s a lot of YouTube videos to teach the Emacs basics.
I too am a BBEdit fanboy (since early in its existence), but there are lots of times when I need a word processor with styles, not a text processor with formatting preview.
Two bits of BBEdit trivia: I sometimes use it simultaneously with Nisus on the same document, if I want to keep an eye on my revisions — initially with CVS, eventually with Git. (I had to keep using an old version in the dark days when BBEdit had dropped support for CVS in favor of Subversion, and not yet yielded to the inevitability of Git.)
Many of my correction comments on the NewsItem web site end with something like “A simple BBEdit workflow would have caught this.”
(BTW, I hereby claim the record for the longest-ever Nisus Classic macro, which converted the second version of my doctoral thesis, formatting and non-ASCII characters in a custom font included, into the LaTeX format demanded on acceptance for the nonexistent Alonzo Church festschrift.)
I loved Write Now. As a teacher I wrote a Write Now version of a MacWrite text book to use in a lab of Mac Plusses, tried to get it published separately but the publisher didn’t see a big enough market at the time. I used it with my students until I left that job.
I love Emacs, but I think a lot of these “why not try {thing}” suggestions miss two points.
A word processor and a text editor aren’t entirely fungible. If I want to format a nice PDF quickly for somebody, particularly a PDF that requires any level at all of graphic design and art direction, “let’s do it in Org mode” is not going to be my first suggestion. I do technical writing in Emacs and am moving a creative writing workflow to it, slowly, but I keep my resume in Pages because it is much, much easier doing what I need there than it would be to replicate it with an toolchain around Emacs (or BBEdit or whatever).
A big issue at hand for someone who is deep into Nisus Writer’s automation/macro language is that switching from Nisus to literally anything else means replicating those scripts in some fashion. That’s not trivial. The issue isn’t whether you can all that and more in Emacs Lisp, the issue is whether a solution that starts with “first, learn Lisp” is the right one for somebody who’s literally running their business on the other, working system. (This is largely what kept me from using Emacs for years: if I needed to get work done today, learning an editor whose learning curve is famously a vertical cliff remained in the “thing to do tomorrow” bucket.)
I’m also a Nisus Writer owner (from the very early days of Nisus Writer Express; I even wrote a review of it for ATPM long ago!), and really dug it for a while, but I noticed the apparent neglect long ago, and hadn’t built up enough love for the product to stick with it after Pages got sufficiently powerful. I don’t run a publishing business that needs an actual print (or PDF) toolchain; I do publish things to the web regularly, but I only produce ebooks and PDFs once every year or two, and my novels require much less complicated formatting than Take Control Books do. Setting up a toolchain to get from a single, easily comprehensible plain text format to TCB’s PDF and ePub styles would certainly be possible, but I am not sure I could be paid enough to figure it all out. :)
I have used Nisus Writer for years. Wrote decades of sermons with it - pardon the zzzzz sounds you hear lol. Its simplicity and complexity allowed me to design it for my needs, not Bill Gate’s grrr. I never feel like Im’ being told how to do my work, rather I shaped the work the way I needed it. It allowed me to easily build catalogues and tables of research and books and so many other things. I could then bookmark them and save it as a bookmarked PDF for ease of use.
It is still my go too app for so many things. I have a couple of older computers that I will be keeping and not using with Wi-Fi in operation so that I can always do documents and then transfer them either as PDFs or rtfs for transfer to my main computer.
Blessings for the developers and people behind this amazing app and prayer for all who will be lost and having to turn to lesser apps to do what they need to do. So sad.
Thanks fro a great thread. This is why I love TidBits! Now back to reading my old sermons - zzzzzz.
For all these cases, if the tool does what your work requires it’s good, and if it lacks what you require (as in the case of Nisus Writer and Take Control books), it’s inadequate in some way. Our writing needs are vastly different. Today, Gruber on Daring Fireball talks about how he never adopted Nisus Writer even while seeing the appeal; instead, he chose BBEdit for his needs. BBEdit would never work for my needs. Even without AppleScript, Mellel fits my needs – which is to produce scientific papers in a specific field with extensive cross-references to tables and figures, integration with Bookends for reference management (which is really excellent in Mellel, but is quite nice in Nisus Writer too), some footnotes and endnotes, strong support of styles at all levels (character, paragraph, headers, notes, tables, document, etc.), and the ability to export to Word for later interaction with the publishers I typically work with (academic publishers like Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press) and other publishers in my field such as de Gruyter, Brill, Elsevier. I used to use both Mellel and Nisus Writer before switching over full time to Mellel. I loved the Glossary feature of Nisus Writer, where I stored the hundreds of OmniGraffle diagrams I use and reuse in my papers; Mellel has nothing like this. I loved the super-powerful and configurable multi-key keyboard shortcuts of Nisus Writer, also missing in Mellel. (The more I can keep my hands on the keyboard, the better, which is another reason I am loving MailMaven and why I liked MailMate.)
So, yes, we probably all bump up against weaknesses and omissions in how we prefer our tools to work. I think it’s a matter of fitting individual needs, rather than a list of features.
Ditto. I don’t use Emacs, but BBEdit, with all my writing in simple Markdown. It’s future-proof. If BBedit goes the way of Nissus, I can always switch to one of a dozen other text editors. And Markdown is easy to convert to any other format I need – PDF, HTML, XML, docx, etc. if someone else needs it in another format.
For a while there it seemed that every five or ten years I was having to port all my word processing files into a few format when the old app was going away (FullWrite, WriteNow, Claris, etc.) and I got sick of it. Now I just use plain text and I’ll never have to worry about my files becoming unreadable.
(For macro/scripting purposes, I use BBedit, Keyboard Maestro, or write my own conversion scripts with Xojo.)
Exactly. I too have both BBEdit and NisusWriter. I use the former to write HTML and such tiny bits of Perl editing as I do. And then, I often use NisusWriter to convert what comes out of BBEdit into other formats such as embellished unicode text, or a formatted document, curling the quotes and so forth. Another use: I often get mis-formatted files that have to go into a page layout program. Into NisusWriter they go, and I do some fixing and then export from NisusWriter with only the formatting elements that I allow (paragraphy style sheets, bold, italic. No 13-point-on-11-point-leading purple text in the Horror of Horros typeface).
Probably I could write my books with some other word processor, as I write my plain text with BBEdit. But NisusWriter lets me bridge the two.
I find myself thinking, if Martin the programmer is at Apple now, it would be really nice if Apple could be induced to take over NisusWriter Pro to give them a high-end word processor, since they have someone who knows the code. But that is truly a pipe dream. I just wish something could be done to keep it alive.
I’ve not used Nisus Writer, but I suspect the most likely scenario is that the owners intend to sell it for parts. As was clearly pointed out in the article, its user base isn’t expanding, so continuing it as a word processor makes little sense. However, there may well be concepts and bits of code worth salvaging for other applications. Or someone might want to purchase the rights, just to keep it out of the hands of their competition.
I used to use DiskDoubler to maximize the use of space on my hard drive. Today, it seems silly to use on-the-fly compression to double the capacity of a hard drive, when larger hard drives are so cheap, but that wasn’t always the case. Symantec bought DiskDoubler, perhaps with the intent to make it a part of Disk Doctor, but instead, they killed it.
I used to use Kenai EyeFi SD cards in my digital cameras. They wirelessly transferred everything I shot to my iPhone, instantly, where they were added to my photo library and synced with iCloud. It was a wonderful product with no equal, before or since. Toshiba makes something similar, but it’s not seamless and offers nothing over manual synchronization. Ricoh bought the Kenai, not for EyeFi but for their cloud service, and they let EyeFi slowly die. Such is life.
Joe -— Thanks for the report. I used Nisus since, let’s see, 89 or 90. I wrote a Frontier binding, FrameMaker export macros and a full featured outliner in what is now called classic. I still use it every day, and will mourn when I have to switch. I think my go to may be to double down on Tinderbox, because if I switch I want to have more control, not less -— and Tbx is basically an emacs of ideas (associated with text). There are very few Mac native app developers of more than one app of any kind these days outside Omnigroup and Panic, maybe Busymac, apps where we celebrated the cleanliness of design. Most of my day uses soul dirtying environments. So the demise of Nisus (and LinkBack) is partly our fault for tolerating the mess we accept.
My 2 cents on this. Although there may not be an immediately profitable future for the product, there will be be a significant user base, of which some users may well be willing to make a contribution in order to keep the wagon on the road. Lots of ifs, but as a passionate afficionado, which you clearly are, you could look at setting up a cooperative of users, collect pledges of funding, and offer to fund the required work to maintain the software and transition it into an open source future. Money, and the collective power of the user base, may even be listened to. Good luck.
Not to mention the fact that compressed-data files are common these days. MP3, JPEG and many other common formats are compressed. Microsoft Office document files are actually zip files. And there are many other examples.
Compressed data can’t be further compressed (e.g. by a utility like Disk Doubler), making such utilities even more pointless.
Given the strong attachment users have, I wonder if there might be a way to do what the Hamricks have done with VueScan? Those of us who have a lifetime Pro license get a yearly begging letter asking for a voluntary donation to keep it going. I have always responded, since I cannot scan negatives satisfactorily any other way. I expect NWP users would too.
The problem is that there is no one to do it. This was part of what Joe was describing. Nisus Software, even four or five years ago, was down to three employees. Joe mentioned two of them: Jerzy (the boss) is old and (I would guess) not really in a position to do the work; I suspect that is a big reason why the product is moribund. Martin, the guy who managed the code, has gone to Apple. Not sure who the third employee was, or what he was doing at the time NW went into passive mode, but it is clear that it’s going to take work to find someone to maintain the code.
I think NW’s feature set is strong enough that it could keep going for a long time in maintenance mode, but even maintenance mode needs someone to do the maintaining. Just having dedicated users isn’t enough. :-(
Like many of you I’ve been using Nisus Writer for decades, and loving it. I do text editing and proofreading for a living, and have to return doc and docx files with change tracking, so for that I use LibreOffice. I was surprised at how few people mentioned LibreOffice in this discussion. But yes, it has the usual clunky, cross platform interface, and I’m always happy when I can get back to my personal work in beautiful Nisus Writer. I’ll be praying for the open-source solution, if a savior doesn’t sweep in to take over the product. I have also left my old CS3 Adobe suite and jumped on the Affinity bandwagon, and am wishing them a long and prosperous subscription-free future!
Yes, even if Apple breaks binary compatibility (as it did to my little iPhone utility) and all Nisus needs is a simple recompile, someone has to be given access to the source code, and to upload the binary to the (or perhaps a) web site. This probably requires money, to pay either a programmer with access to the closed source, or the company to compensate it for opening the source.
My experience with shareware for my Newton apps suggests that voluntary donations wouldn’t work, and the one-time purchase business model seems to have failed. Hence my suggestion of Kickstarter, which seems to be working for some books and movies; I don’t know how well it works for software.
I tried EagleFiler now, again. Not ready for prime time. It could not handle 420k Mails (40GB) - “Damaged Indexes” while importing, sluggish UI. No comparison to InfoClick, unfortunately.
Hi – my own experience in having more than 1M email messages in EagleFiler has been quite positive. EagleFiler has been amazingly robust for me and the developer, Michael Tsai, superb and responsive.