Nisus Writer: Schrödinger’s Word Processor

Love your quantum mechanics references. I hope Nisus can live again. I have documents in it, and I really like it. I have, however, moved on to Mellel. (Actually, I’ve owned both for decades, since Nisus Writer was Nisus and non-contiguous selection was a miracle.)

Ah, too bad. I still use Nisus for a fair number of things, though not my main word processor. It’s a shame – areas like this get dominated by developers (Apple, MS) that don’t have singular incentives to make their apps best in class.

Joe, thanks for all your efforts and for posting this to alert the community of Nisus users. I don’t know how long I’ve been using Nisus, but it must be 25-30 years. I use it for most of my writing because I love its simplicity for me as a user and because its use of RTF format makes it easy to convert when I need to deliver to .docx to deliver to publishers.

I’m saddened but now that I look at it, I should not be surprised. Nisus never added an option to translate output into .docx, which has been the standard Word format for a LONG time now. I would love somebody to pick it up, or for the family to make it open source. I don’t know how hard it would be to update; I am a long-time Quicken user and went through the problems of updating that.

I have Microsoft Office because it’s essential in the profession writing world for its compatibility with other publishing software and its Change Tracking feature for working with editors. I never used any Apple word processor after MacWrite 1; never had the features I need for writing serious technology books with equations and Greek letters. Google has the same limit, and it’s Google, which I don’t trust. I’ll keep hoping for a savior for Nisus Writer, but it may be time to think about options.

I’ve had a somewhat similar experience with a vector graphics tool I’ve used for decades and rely on daily - Intaglio; the developer abandoned the software a few years ago, I’m happy it still runs (with occasional non-fatal quirks).

Have you tried Mellel? My writing for publication in scientific journals doesn’t involve equations (but Mellel just added that feature), but it does require a lot of complex figures (based on screenshots of video, diagrams I produce in OmniGraffle and sometimes now Freeform), cross-referencing, good interaction with a reference manager (Bookends for me), and more. Mellel is solid. And it has an active user forum that the developer participates in. It exports to docx when it comes time to submit to a publisher.

@ShermanWilcox I have indeed tried Mellel. It’s nice, but unfortunately, it can’t do half of the things we need for Take Control Books.

Don’t forget the company’s other product, InfoClick. It is far and away the easiest way to search old email messages. I would miss that quite as much as Nisus.

Mellel has replaced Nisus for me. For those things Mellel can’t do, it’s fine as a story editor for desktop publishing.

Unfortunately, my choice for desktop publishing is Affinity Publisher, whose new owners ceased sales for the month of October pending Canva’s Halloween surprise. Sort of a mirror image of Nisus support, equally un-recommendable.

I’m hoping Canva’s Halloween surprise is a treat, not a trick.

Schrödinger hasn’t yet resolved an opinion on Affinity. I could be mourning its downfall prematurely.

I’ve been hoping the same thing for Nisus.

A more appropriate quote would be “He’s Dead, Jim”.

I don’t have a opinion on this since I could never justify purchasing Nisus Writer for my limited word processing needs. Pages does everything I need it to do.

I think Joe nailed it when he said that the market is saturated. It sounds like there’s a group of people for whom Nisus Writer fits their needs. I’m betting that niche has been filled. It’s really hard to try to get money out of the same people to whom you’ve already sold a word processor. If you don’t engage in “feature creep”, you run out of new things that people need. At that point, your users just want the product to continue to work with new macOS versions. That’s not really a way to keep a business going.

For me, I use Pages for my personal word processing needs and I rent Word when I needed to upload a resume. Most applicant tracking systems don’t accept the DOCX file that comes out of Pages. It only likes the official document created in Word.

Bob C

Thanks Joe, appreciate your efforts here. It must be difficult also for the family, accepting the outcomes in front of them. A generation of pioneers has been aging, indeed passing of late, and the smaller the operation the more personal the expression. These decisions are not so cut and dried. I always enjoyed the good humor and liveliness in their email updates, connecting us back to their indie freak roots. Nothing sterile about it, an update I would set aside coffee time for. I hope they can see releasing Nisus back into the wild as a continuation of those roots, and see what the open source community can bring to bloom.

While I’ve never been a Nisus user or customer, reading this article made my heart ache for those who are and have been worried over its future.

Long-lived software seems to be an increasing rarity these days. The only other examples that I know of and use regularly are BBEdit, Keyboard Maestro and Audio Hijack. Developer misfortune or acquisition & subsequent dereliction appear to be the primary culprits, though operating system changes also play a part in some cases. More worrying are those instances where apps do continue being developed, but into something that loses features or becomes less usable.

Back when I was still a Windows user, I was gutted when both Microsoft Works and Microsoft Money were discontinued. I also mourn the loss of Macromedia Fireworks, which survived for a while after Macromedia were gobbled up by Adobe but was dropped shortly after the first version of Creative Cloud released.

These days, I do my personal writing in iA Writer, and only open Pages when I need to create a physical document. Thankfully, I have no need for Microsoft Word, which I consider a blessing because when I last tried it, I found the experience annoying at best and curse-inducing at worst.

Far worse: I use and simply love Nisus InfoClick. I advertise it to a lot of people. It is a great tool to manage a large amount of eMails. In my case i have roughly 500.000 eMail files (a 40GB archive) that are indexed and searchable by InfoClick within milliseconds.

Anyone using this as well?

Far worse: I use and simply love Nisus InfoClick. I advertise it to a lot of people. It is a great tool to manage a large amount of eMails. In my case i have roughly 500.000 eMail files (a 40GB archive) that are indexed and searchable by InfoClick within milliseconds.

Anyone using this as well?

No; EagleFiler will do this well though.

Searching the web, you can find a number of other word processors. I found a dozen listed at 12 Best Mac (Word Processor) Writing Apps for 2025 | Envato Tuts+

Look closely and you will find some are designed for special purposes. Scriviner is for long-form book writing (20,000 words and up). Others are for script writing. I never heard of some others.

I have been using Nisus Writer as my main word processor, with Microsoft Word for finishing up and working with editors using Change Tracking. Word’s strength is its versatility; it can do almost anything that I’ve encountered in publishing. Word’s weaknesses stem largely from trying to do everything for everybody, which makes it confusing and fragile, and Microsoft is largely unresponsive to users who encounter problems.

LaTeX is open-source and described as a typesetting system. Functionally it’s a word-processing system for scientific and technical publishing. I have never used it, but it’s widely used for scientific and technical books, and there is a Mac version. https://www.latex-project.org/

Another option is LibreOffice or other open source office suites.

I wouldn’t call it a word processor.

The nature of TeX and its various derivatives is that you write your context using a plain text editor, applying formatting with in-line markup. Conceptually similar to composing a web page by writing raw HTML/CSS code.

The TeX system compiles these text files into device-independent and device-dependent output files designed for output devices (like PostScript for a printer or PDF for a viewer). It literally doesn’t do anything else that you would expect from even the most basic word processor - like provide an editor.

True, there’s no shortage of other Mac word processors. I’m sure that for many people, any number of them would be perfectly adequate. However, if you’re the sort of person who needs the tools that only Nisus Writer provides, none of that matters. Although I can’t speak for anyone else, I can definitely speak for Take Control Books, and we would be unable to do what we need to do in any of those other apps. Users who have built up libraries of complex macros in Nisus Writer, or who require find-and-replace based on style-sensitive regular expressions (to take just two examples) would be seriously hampered by another app. So, it’s all a matter of one’s individual needs.

I used it for a good long period of time but now find that Mailmate’s search does the job just fine.

Oh! My misunderstanding comes from my experience in publishing. I was the business manager of the university student newspaper when I was in college in the late 1960s and the printer used a Linotype machine. The printer read the typed manuscript and the machine set lead type. It was quite a contraption. Linotype machine - Wikipedia It literally was a typesetting system. When I was the managing editor of a trade magazine in the late 1970s, we sent typed and edited manuscript from typewriters to the printer, who set type on what was then a more modern system. The magazine didn’t start computer typesetting until the 1980s, when I was freelancing and did not have to deal with the software involved. When I talked with Wiley about software to use for typesetting my latest book, they said my choices were Microsoft Word or LaTeX, so I assumed it functioned like Word. I have used WYSIWYG software to produce my web site and have talked with colleagues about the process, but I never thought to explore how the software worked. Thanks for the clarification.

I can understand your situation if you need to impose a coherent style on all your books, and you found Nisus Writer does that well for you. I’ve never used Macros and do minimal formatting because most publishers I work with have their own styles which they impose on outside writers during the editing process. Mostly, all they insist upon is submitting manuscripts in docx format and formatting the fiddly stuff like Equations, Greek Letters and special characters. That’s why everything I submit now goes out in docx format, which is the only software I can trust for the fiddly stuff and Change Tracking, although I don’t like working in it.

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!

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.

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.

1. 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).
2. 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 miss ClarisWorks…

Mellel still doesn’t have AppleScript (or any other scripting language) support. That’s a pretty big omission.

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.

I guess it is.

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 still mourn MacWrite Pro

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.

I’d be happy to look into that with you if you contact [email protected]. EagleFiler can definitely handle large amounts of mail—I have multiple 100 GB libraries myself. Indexing happens after importing, and a damaged file could be the result of problems with the storage medium or if some other process (e.g. cloud syncing) is writing to the file while EagleFiler is indexing. Once indexing has completed, the UI should be much faster.

Update: It’s unclear why the index was damaged—perhaps related to the external SSD where the EagleFiler indexes were being stored. The main issue was importing all the mail in .eml format with one file per message. The customer had used emailchemy to export from Apple Mail into this format and then tried to import the files into EagleFiler. This will normally work but is much less efficient. If you have EagleFiler import directly from Apple Mail it will do this in a much more efficient way, storing one file per mailbox and also creating separate, smaller indexes. If the messages are already in .eml format outside of Apple Mail, you can merge them into mailboxes once they get to EagleFiler to achieve the same effect.

In a project as long-running as Nisus/Nisus Writer, a “simple recompile” could well involve a complicated tool chain that might include legacy, out-of-date, or arcane proprietary components. I have worked on several mature products where part of the code has been linked in for many generations from binaries that can no longer be recreated or re-compiled because the tool chain is no longer viable.

I would love to see Nisus Writer open-sourced, and I believe that even a product whose source code has been made public can still be commercially viable (Microsoft didn’t fold when the Windows source code got leaked). But for large, complex software projects just having access to the source code isn’t always enough to move the project forward or even just maintain it.

Here I’m talking about stuff I know little about, but for someone who needs what only the current version of Nisus Writer provides (like Joe), would a possible solution be to either devote one mac to remain on the current system software for as long as possible; or perhaps use emulation software like Parallels Decktop to run it?

From everything I’ve read in this thread, it seems doubtful that there will be a realistic way forward for Nisus.

It would be great if Nisus Writer has a path forward, but even open-sourcing it can be a challenge without someone available to review the code in detail. Especially with proprietary software, there may be separately licensed third-party code or libraries that are needed to build or execute the code. If so, it is likely that there would be legal issues that would prevent releasing those bits of code to the community. Such code would either need to be relicensed or the functionality would need to be independently reconstituted. Plus, as @ron mentioned, even building software with legacy components can be much more difficult than expected.

Whether Nisus Writer can be commercially supported or released as an open source project, at least the initial effort would be a siginificant amount of work. For now, I recommend that anyone who depends on it should download a known-to-work installer and that all license codes be stored securely. Such users also should consider verifying that they can do what they need to do in a virtual machine to protect against future changes to Apple software that might break Nisus Writer functionality.

PS. I don’t know if Nisus Writer uses an activation server or if the necessary logic to interpret a license code is embedded in the software. If the former, that is even more reason to verify that you have an active, working, licensed copy of the software working in a virtual machine.

How usable do you find Libre Office and have you found anything other than MS Word that can make Change Tracking work. I hesitate to say anything can do Change Tracking well. MS word generates multiple frames on the screen, and often they are barely readable. Of course, the real problem with Change Tracking is editors who try to keep track of all the changes in a back-and-forth edit.

Should be easy enough to upload the Nisus Writer manual to an AI, and ask it to create an application that works the same way.

…which is what too many pundits seem to think.

LOL. I watch Y Combinator videos so that I sound like I keep up with things for my day job, and almost every video features some excited, self-serving AI exec gushing about how “everything is moving soooooo fast” and “it is unbelievable what we are seeing with our internal AIs” and “we are seeing the world change in front of our eyes”.

They’re right. It is unbelievable.

Yes! I believe that MacWrite Pro, (And wasn’t there a MWP II version? Not sure), was just too late to the game to withstand the stranglehold that MSFT had built up by then. It had good styles, of which an attribute could be language, meaning that various edits could be targeted to specific languages in a multilingual document. I loved it.

And if MWP was late to the game, FullWrite was too early. It was extremely powerful for its time, but that power really wanted the SE30 or above to work its magic. But I still had some good projects with it on my old Mac Plus!

I would love to see an open source project of this sort. It would face stiff competition with LibreOffice and others, however.

Thank you. And thank you for the help with EagleFiler. Works better now!

It’s been an interesting thread, however…

At the risk of sounding unsympathetic, it sounds not so much like Schrödinger’s cat as it does a dead horse. Everything which has been written here suggests Nisus is at a terminal stage of its life. Elderly owners, developers who’ve moved on, and the future market appears remarkably niche.

I’m not for a moment underestimating the value some users derive from it, but it appears the appeal is not broad enough to support ongoing development.

Just so I don’t come across as totally heartless, this is exactly how I, and many thousands of others, felt when Apple pulled the rug from under Aperture. Sadly, this is the way of the industry. Business models fail, developers move on, companies lose interest in their own products and apps die.

I think hoping for open sourcing is so much in vain, it’s like trying to perform CPR on someone who’s already been buried.

Odds are that you are right. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone who has not used NWP extensively can appreciate how utterly valuable this program is. The only thing I can really compare it to is FrameMaker, which was the ultimate tool for structured documents. There is no replacement, and probably never will be. NisusWriter isn’t a structured document tool, but it’s an unmatched formatted-text management tool. So, because there is no replacement, we grasp at straws.

The comparison isn’t idle. My first book was done in FrameMaker. No other tool could do the task as elegantly. The books I have written since it died have been done in NisusWriter – not because NisusWriter can do the same things (it can’t) but because NWP’s other tools are powerful enough that they can make up for some of the things it can’t do directly. The idea of writing the sort of book I do (intensely complicated and cross-references and footnoted) with Word or Pages or Google Docs or even InDesign – is somewhere between daunting and hopeless.

Was late to Nisus Writer (2022) for writing that involves lots of endnotes, cross-references and comparing passages of text in the same document. Took the gamble, even though development seemed to be in ‘maintenance mode’ … it has served me well so far. The way Nisus allows splitting the window multiple times in either direction and synchronize the scroll position between them is gold! Seems simple enough for other word processors – e.g. LibreOffice – to implement this, yet nobody does. The way Nisus handles endnotes (anchors) and their associated formatting is wonderfully transparent … transforming them to regular body text is relatively easy using the available inspectors and macros. Try doing that in Word without expensive add-ons, complicated VBA Macros and lots of trial and error. The programme’s weakest point has been the lack of transparent modern docx reading and writing; a round-trip of exporting and importing or the manual merging of documents is involved. Potential alternatives: Scrivener, Pandoc Markdown, Mellel.

You mention SpeedTrack only in passing (and, it appears to me, dismissively), but why not try contacting them?

Just a question: maybe you already said, but why did you reject Mellel for these kind of books? The reason I find it so useful is for these kind of research articles and book chapters – complicated with numbered and cross-referenced figures containing OmniGraffle generate diagrams, figures with multiple photos, etc. And tight integration with Bookends for references.

It has been a while since I’ve even considered Mellel, but it may well be that it would be sufficient for cross-reference and figure numbering sorts of needs; Mellel was often the word processor considered closest in target audience to NWP. However, I also use the PowerFind/GREP and macro capabilities of NWP.

No single feature of NWP is absolutely unique (though PowerFind comes close), but no program has all those features together.

Yes, I used both and continue to do my writing (journal articles, book chapters) in Mellel. It has GREP. I don’t think it’s as powerful or as easy as NWP, but I’m not much of an expert in either.

thanks for this thoughtful overview @jk1

I’ve been on Nisus since the very start, and it’s the UX that triggers my best writing. Over the years, the support Martin offered was quick, clear and useful. Everything about my engagements with the software and the company was a model for what I hoped for (but rarely found) from other software companies.

The bigger issue here, which I’ll cover in a blog post (thanks for the nudge) is that we’re constantly building (and living in) ghost cities. The creative destruction (or simply destruction) of our digital civilizations is persistent, and there are few good counterexamples of what to do about it.

Even harder to counter than decaying software are decaying networks.

Good luck finding people to swap Amiga software with.

[Semi-unrelated: the internet is vast, billions of people, but then, in a discussion of Nisus, I see a post from @JimLeff … hi Jim!. I think there’s a metaphor there as well.]

LibreOffice is very usable these days. I remember trying both it and OpenOffice in the past, and they have come a LONG way! I find it very useful for maintaining a Microsoft-free zone. I gave up trying to use Nisus Writer to open and save doc files, and am thankful for all the work that has gone into making the LibreOffice clone. The one difficulty I found with Word files was when Text Boxes are used, most apps seemed to have a lot of trouble with those. Thankfully the files I get are pretty simple. One client sends me docx files with multi-page tables, and those work fine as well, though text in a cell sometimes disappears, and just scrolling a bit brings it back. I’m perfectly happy to put up with that sort of thing to avoid using Word!

The change tracking is working well, even when I get files from windows users, they haven’t been complaining. We are inserting comments too, and those work fine. I think the area of danger is when someone is using Word to LAY OUT a manual or something (naughty naughty, a recipe for lots of trouble). Round-tripping that to my Mac then back to windows is probably going to mess things up a bit, so I try to avoid that. I’m not even sure it would be perfect with the latest version of Word.

Since Word users assume the entire world is using it, I never mention that I’m on a Mac, or that I’m using something other than Word. So far LibreOffice is keeping my secrets safe!

Thanks for the very encouraging report on LibreOffice. That’s something I need to try very soon.

As for the LAYOUT problem, I do understand the difference, but Adobe seems to have cornered the market is but very difficult to learn and very expensive. When I self-republished a book of mine that had gone out of print that I only had complete in PDF, it took an inordinate amount of time to make a few small changes on Amazon’s system. The last time I looked, self-publishing services accepted documents in Word format and did not offer layout services.

Well, Affinity has just changed the ‘very expensive’ part. They’re no harder to learn than any other software.

I’ve uploaded entire books as PDF to Amazon KDP. I can’t see republishing being an issue if you have the original native file.
I don’t use Word (or any of its substitutes) and have always used PDF - but I typically don’t do reflowable books. I’m currently on my first attempt at something for Epub and have used Pages after it rendered a fairly good test export. My preferred choice is InDesign but getting the reflow right seemed problematic - especially if you want to also submit to multiple platforms (but I admit I have tested exhaustively).

FYI: Mellel is offering a cross-grade discount for Nisus users

Thanks for the suggestion.

The problem is that I did not have the original native file. The original book went through five editions, the last in 2006, and for each one new edition they just had me add changes, apparently thinking they would only need to reset the changes. It was about a fast-changing field, so there were lots of changes, and nowhere did I have an original native file. What I did was scan the book and use a PDF image PDFs for the 800 page book. I had to make small changes on a few pages and that was enough to be a pain, but it has earned me a nice profit selling PDF ebooks and print copies of the book.

Yes. Michael helped me out.

I did change my import from 450k single mail files to 30 mbox files covering a full year.

EagleFiler is way more responsive now and a joy to work with.

Hi Seth. Did you write that blog post yet and where is it available? Cheers!

thanks @hengsure

Count me in the fan club; My entire computer system is FULL of Nisus documents as I have never used anything else since I met the creator at a Mac World Forum many years ago. Glad to help in any way I can as this is a great piece of software. I like the Open Source route if a buyer can’t be found.

Another factor to consider in addition to this might be the slope of the internet.
A French artist, Louise Druhl, posits that the early days of the Web had a gentle slope, which facilitated meandering, with serendipitous discoveries, let us not forget the delights of StumbleUpon, and why we called software Navigator, Explorer, Safari… Nowadays, she points out that the Web has a much steeper slope, funnelling us rapidly into fewer sites which people rarely leave. Decreasing vastness might be a fellow traveller to fewer choices.

Your ghost cities of the Internet post reminded me most clearly of the delights in Café Utne, an early pioneering online community, moderated fora with a lot of interesting characters.

Uh-oh.

This morning, every Nisus document is watermarked with this:

Created by a demo of Nisus Writer Pro

I discovered that the license window was blank. So I re-entered my License key. Which returned this:

The entered license key has been revoked.

Anybody have a solution?

nisus-demo-watermark1532×1886 138 KB

license-revoked600×484 68 KB

Google returns no hits on nisus license key revoked in the last week. Is it just your key that was revoked?

It occurred to me that this began right after I updated to Sequoia 15.7.2. Repeated re-registration attempts failed until I restarted the Mac. Then registration “took”.

This raises an interesting question. Do Nisus products phone home to continue verifying registration (a la Adobe)? Or is the certificate stored locally? If it needs an Internet connection to verify ownership regularly, what happens when the company eventually folds?

I am on macOS 15.7.1. When I quit NWP right now and then relaunched it, it had decided that I was now on day 3 of the demo period. So I re-entered my license and name, LittleSnitch told me NWP wanted to connect to nisus.com, but even when I denied the connection, NWP accepted the license. Upon a new relaunch, everything worked fine.

As of December, the Nisus “check for update” function in the app has been restored, and the nisus.com website is back, complete if unrefreshed. I have used Nisus since the late 1980s. It has evolved into much more than a great, plain text word processor, with multi-language typesetting and layout capablilities that allowed me to kick Adobe to the kerb long ago, along with MSWord. Hope the torch gets passed.

I spoke too soon. This morning (Dec 4, EST) got the following message when trying to connect w/ nisus.com:

Error 502, Bad Gateway, Bunny.net

Just checked it and some – but not all – of it was back again at Noon Eastern

My license for Nisus Writer was revoked yesterday, re-registering fixed that. It is now revoked again today.

Just checked, my Nisus Writer Pro is working fine, no license problem.

Posted in the Nisus forum (by myself): Supposing that Nisus survived, and it merged with another product/sector to revolutionise document creation and management, what would that product/sector be?

This happened to me once. Restarting the Mac solved it. For now.
I see a catastrophic day on the horizon for Nisus users.

Any reports yet of problems using Nisus with OS26? I’m still holding on with Sequoia 15.7.1 but worrying about when Apple will do something that kills Nisus. My first option may be Pages but I am not sure how well it can meet my needs. Some of my writing does require Equations, which probably will force me to Word.

I’m no longer using NWP, but I just launched it and opened some documents I had written in it in 2025. Everything seemed fine, but there’s nothing fancy in them.

I would never do my primary writing in Word. I’d spend more time screaming than thinking. FWIW, I now use Mellel, which does have equation support – how well, I can’t say because I don’t need equations. When I need to interface with people who require Word documents, such as publishers, the export seems relatively sufficient. I double-check it, of course, and I do find glitches that need my attention in Word. But even that it not enough to get me to spend my productive time in Word.

I use both Simplified and Traditional Chinese in my translations of Buddhist texts and Nisus Writer Pro has been an invaluable tool, fielding seamless switching back and forth from Chinese to English and back again. Nisus’s future demise is painful to contemplate. Could Mellel replace it? Oh my, if only somebody would kindly release Nisus’s code as open source their merit would be substantial!

I think it could. It has excellent font and writing system support. But the best way to find out is to try it. I think there’s a trial.

Last night Nisus Writer reminded me of one of its nicest feature – the ability to save what you’re writing every minute. That may seem excessive, but when you live in a neighborhood with overhead wiring and reckless drivers, a potential disaster may not be far away. There’s nothing like a BANG!!! a couple of doors down the street, followed by a moment of flickering lights and then darkness. This time it a drag and drop error, so I had to rely on TimeMachine every hour to save the bacon the file I wanted, but it reminded me how nice it is to have minute-scale backup.

I find it to be simpler to switch between two input sources in Mellel (with its primary and secondary fonts) than in Nisus. I was a devoted Nisus user in pre-OSX days, but after moving to OSX the problems I encountered in switching easily between English and Japanese while retaining different font settings for each were one of the reasons that I stopped using Nisus and started using Mellel, and I have been using it happily ever since.

That’s helpful, thanks. I took advantage of Mellel’s cross-grade offer and I’m test-driving.

Mellel has good docs and really helpful staff.

Hi All, I have some important info about Nisus. I joined the Nisus forum today to try to post there, but while joining worked, I got a message that an admin will check my post before it is visible to others. I then looked at the user list and saw that for as far back as November 2024 (yeah 24 not 25), all users who joined since that time are shown as having 0 posts, so only users registered before then can start posting. This makes sense for an un-administered forum since otherwise it would get filled with spam. But it also means new users of Nisus have zero voice. I am copy-pasting my intended post in the next post (in case there is a length limit or some other quirk). Please, someone with posting privileges on Nisus forums, post it for me there, so that people considering purchasing the software are aware of the state of things.

Here is a copy-paste of my intended post on Nisus forums:

I have been lurking here and reading about Nisus software for a while. Apparently I’m not the only one, as while I was logging on I noticed there are over 750 people looking at the forums as I type this. I finally registered to make a post because I haven’t seen any other posts raising a particular important issue.

I think it is well known now that Nisus is ending its long and successful life, and it is not likely to be “rescued.” But I am used to using old software (on my old computers) and the current Nisus is a lot newer than my current favorite “word processor” (and layout software) which is Pages '09, before the big re-write of iWork. I keep around several computers with old systems in part to use that (and other) older software. (Yes I also have much newer computers, using Linux and Windows. But I love my old Macs.) So I was considering Nisus for a while, as well as the software for searching Apple Mail. They work on my current primary Mac, which is running Catalina, an OS that can’t run Pages '09. So Nisus software still has value, even if it is no longer updated.

I made a purchase on January 19 using Nisus’ website. My credit card was charged for the purchase. But in the field where there was supposed to be a software key, instead of a software key, there was an error note and a message to contact customer service. Meaning, the system that takes payments for Nisus software is not capable of generating keys anymore, while it is capable of charging credit cards for those missing keys. Worse still, I tried all 3 email addresses I found for Nisus. One of them bounced my message and two of them remain unanswered. To me this is clear indication that Nisus owners aren’t keeping the site alive to make money, but just no longer able/willing to pay any attention. I suppose people making purchases end up calling their credit card company to reverse the charge, but I really want to avoid that.

I hope this is helpful to other lurkers who are looking at this software and considering buying it. It is very sad, but it is fair to warn others. If I eventually get a reply (and hopefully a software key, before my monthly credit card bill payment is due), I will post here that it is probably safe to purchase, if a bit risky. But right now I want to warn everyone considering a purchase that until we hear an update about what is going on, it is not a good idea to make any purchases from this company.

Thanks very much to user “Elbrecht” for posting my message on the Nisus forum. I should add that in addition to not being allowed to post (because I can’t get past the “first-post-admin-check” gate keeping) I am also not permitted to send private messages on the Nisus forums. The forums have had no administration since sometime in November 2024. No users who jointed since that time have been able to participate, and the website – and company – really seems to be abandoned. I am hoping for a rescue but it seems bleak.

I considered moving to Mellel, but I am worried that it uses its own file format. I was an early adopter of WriteNow, and for many years I thought that I had lost all of those files. (I just learned that if you add a “.wn4” file extension, LibreOffice can open the files!) But I am worried of a replay of that problem.

Secondly, I have no idea how to effectively share a Mellel file with another user. Exporting as a common file format and then importing the changes seems like a lot of work. Perhaps this is what Google Docs and LibreOffice are for—but then why use Mellel also?

I’ve noticed the Nisus website has been down for several days, which isn’t a good sign.

Moreover, I’m getting notifications from my Mac that Nisus has code reaching back to Intel days, and that it won’t work with future OS releases sometime in the future. I don’t know if it means the next release, but if Nisus folds its functionality days are indeed limited. I haven’t come close to finding a suitable replacement, so I can only hope that day is far into the future.

My guess is that an announcement about OS-incompatible software will be made during a Developer’s Conference.

Mellel is a professional-level word processor aimed at people who often work with longer or structured documents, like academics, scientists, and so on. It also has excellent support for multiple languages in the same document. I applaud Mellel for building an important niche in the marketplace for itself, but it’s not for everyone.

I see people discussing issues accessing various file formats, with LibreOffice suggested as an alternate to Nisus. A major strength leading to features exceeding other word processors has always been Nisus’ incorporation of open source tools from Unix. One example is access to GREP for essentially unlimited document munging, provided through the easy to use GUI of Nisus’ Find, PowerFind and PowerFind Pro. Another is LiberOffice tools for format translation opening or writing documents, selectable as a preference.

Screenshot 2026-05-03 at 1.12.27 PM1624×1136 143 KB

Such transparent access to so much power is typical of Nisus. Transparent access is a major asset, yet also may have contributed to Nisus’ downfall. Unobtrusive access to so many diverse features makes overlooking Nisus’ power a mistake which has been too easily made by reviewers.

I just checked and the nisus.com web site opens but seems to have very limited function. It may be time to start looking around seriously for a replacement.

Naively believing that NWP was finally moving ahead, I reacted to the update message and paid the USD 45. However, where my license key was supposed to be, it said “Internal error. Contact Customer Support.” Which I then did (two days ago), but with no reply yet. After reading the messages here, I then re-entered my old license key – and the watermark was removed.

Thank you, Joe, for your posting. I have been using Nisus forever, and I would have gladly paid an extra USD 45 several times over to continue grepping away — it just makes me sad to see this extremely useful piece of software fade away.

Barring an eleventh hour rescue by a new owner, Nisus Writer is going to break. It could be as soon as macOS La Jolla, but certainly within a year.

After testing all the replacements suggested here, I settled on Apple Pages as the optimal substitute for my use. It has a similar Table of Contents sidebar with bookmarked pages, sections and words.

Pages will faithfully open a complex Nisus Writer document. It will preserve all tables, inline images, and especially images within table cells, as long as that document was saved as .rtfd.

It’s unfortunate that conversion from .rtf to .rtfd must take place within Nisus Writer, one file at a time. I am playing with an AppleScript to automate the process somehow.

What I will miss most is the powerful macros tool. Pages has no macros at all. Is any third party utility capable of providing an equivalent? Keyboard Maestro, TextExpander, Automator, etc.?

I would use it more if they followed Nisus in the ability to create tables from tab delimited text. I use that function extensively for so many things and far prefer it from setting up a table and then having to copy and paste content. To me that is a game breaker. Also I really live the layout of predefined text items available with a simple click.

I cannot really see any good alternative to Nisus Writer that is fully suitable for my needs. Nisus allows me to focus on the writing, with shorter interruptions and far less time-consuming operations than found elsewhere. For instance, I need to constantly switch between character styles, languages and keyboard layouts and have one single keyboard shortcut for all of this at once. I benefit greatly from the automatic highlighting of substituted fonts, and the Glossaries feature is marvellous. I rely heavily on styles, and redefining them is far easier in Nisus than in any other word processor. The rtf files are also fairly compatible with Word and LibreOffice, though there are some quirks.

I switched to Nisus when Apple changed Pages in 2013. I do not trust that Apple won’t do this again. Mellel is nice, although it has a more challenging interface, but last time I tried, I had some problems importing or exporting character styles reliably (I can’t remember the details). LibreOffice has many interesting features and great cross-platform compatibility, but it is cumbersome and feels buggy.

Nisus Writer Pro has been of enormous help for me, and nothing can fully replace it.

BBEdit makes HTML tables from tab-delimited files; don’t know if that helps or not.

Microsoft Word also has a Text to Table command.

But I assume @dougeddy has more reasons than just this one feature for not changing apps.

What does BBEdit offer? When I look at their site, what I see is largely focused on writing code. Is it suitable for general writing about science and technology, which requires Greek letters, math symbols, equations and such.

BBEdit won’t work for your purposes I’m afraid. It’s a plain text editor much beloved by programmers & web developers and there are a surprising number of journalists who use it.

Dave

BBEdit doesn’t support academic standards, like footnotes, directly, It has very good support for LATEX.

BBEDit is a powerful text editor. It is not, at all, a word proessor. But it is extremelt powerful and complex in terms of manipulating text, inclding various human and machine (programming) languages.

I cannot recommend this approachj, but for one part of the TidBITS Content Network distribution process, I need to split a Word document (exported from Google Docs, I’m not an animal) that contains articles and tips into eight separate documents. I used to have a Nisus Writer macro that did this, but it always had problems with resizing graphics in the articles, which became nearly impossible to fix manually in Word in some recent Word update.

So I got ChatGPT to walk me through writing a Word macro that does the same thing. It took a while to get right—there were lots of sandboxing and permissions problems, and I have to save each new document manually—but it does work, and more quickly than using the Nisus Writer macro and resizing images manually.

As I said, I do not recommend scripting in Word at all, but if you just need one thing, it might be worth the pain.

I think that’s a tad harsh, Adam. I have several scripts in Word which I’ve used for years and serve me well. They’re not complex but they are handy.

So I got ChatGPT to walk me through writing a Word macro…

Hmm. You just pointed out something I hadn’t considered: Ask a bot to devise a scheme to simulate or automate something I miss in a particular application, or something too hard to wrestle on my own.

(And I love “I’m not an animal”!)

I find Word to be a nightmare - I like their PowerPoint and Excel but find Word cluttered and seeking to much to control anything I’m trying to work on. I will look again at Pages because I went to Nisus and never looked back after decades of Pages lol. My Nisus Writer is still working very well and I continue to use it but see the writing on the wall (pun intended). No alternative appears to be coming and I wish they would update Nisus, but then I always seem to be a “get off of my lawn” sort of guy. I have hundreds of Nisus documents that I still go back to for things I’m working on. Nice to see there are so many others who treasure a great app. I’m going to hang my head in sadness - sort of like how I felt after the Bill’s season last fall…

I agree Word is a nightmare – a tangled web of attempts to allow everyone to do everything that anybody ever asked MS to do, implemented in the form of levels upon levels without informing users (at least that I ever saw). I loved Nisus’s simplicity and used very few of its features, but the good news is that the use of .rtf files as the default means the files are very easy to translate if you didn’t do anything too fancy or use macros. I searched my files and I found only two .rtfd files and no zrtf. I don’t use macros, but if you did you should check for them.

I sometimes have to resize hundreds of images in a document to the same size (x or y) and use the PicTool extension in LibreOffice for this. Works like a charm.

My script is very handy! But the entire experience of creating and using it was pretty awful.

That’s one of the very big wins of AI!

Good to know! In this case, the images were right in Google Docs and stayed right in Nisus Writer, but when the macro converted the Nisus Writer documents to Word format, they often grew ridiculously large. For years, resizing them was just a matter of dragging a resize handle but at some point, that got very fussy in Word, and I would often end up reversing the image inadvertently. I tried resizing them by entering image dimensions, and that worked, but it was slow.

The death knell tolls.

Screenshot 2026-05-22 at 08.36.58692×220 43.3 KB

Intel components will continue to run in macOS 27. So, the choice is:

• Switch from Nisus Writer Pro before upgrading to macOS 28
• Stay on macOS 27 forever.

And just thinking about timelines for each of those – MacOS 27 will be released in September of this year; MacOS 28 in September of 2027, so if you’re a bleeding edge upgrader that gives you 14 months from today. If you want to wait until a couple of point releases, that’s 18+ months or so.

For staying on MacOS 27, you’ll have years. Sonoma (which was released in 2023) just got a point release for security reasons. Assuming* Apple keeps doing that, that’s at least until well into 2030 before you have to start worrying about it for security issues.

*insert phrase about “assuming” here.

According to a thread on the Nisus forum, removing Nisus File Converter from the app bundle stops these alerts.

How about a related video clip instead?
;-)

“whois nisus.com” tells that the domain will expire on 7 July 2026. One year ago, the domain was renewed one month prior to the expiry date. This has not yet happened this year.

Well the end has arrived. When I went to print a document in Nisus Writer Pro I got the following result - so sad. I’m working around it by using Nisus to design a document I am using and then copying it into another program like Text Edit or LibreOffice, anything to avoid the nightmare of Pages or Word. grr!

SAMPLE NISUS WRITER PRO PRINTOUT WITH WATERMARKING 06-17-2026.pdf (21.5 KB)

This was reported also in November 2025, see the comments above. I re-entered my name and license, and Nisus Writer Pro worked again (and still works). I let Little Snitch block the connection attempt to nisus.com, not knowing if that was necessary, but I have had no problems afterwards.

Thank you for a great idea. My problem is that I purchased Little Snitch (used to use it back in 2019) and tried to install it on my iMac 2019 running Sequoia. It ran for hours saying it was Installing Little Snitch. I finally quit the install and deleted the whole program (w AppCleaner app which deletes everything related to the program (not the dmg to install). Is it normal for Little Snitch to take hours to install? I don’t recall it having taken so long before. Appreciate your help. It will be great to have my favorite program back. Right now I have found documents I create in Nisus Writer that I save in RTF can be opened into Word and, thus far, come out fully formatted. I have not tried one of my larger files that contained multiple tables and are bookmarked and have a hyperlinked table of contents.

Again, thank you for a great idea!!

LITTLE SNITCH INSTALL SHOT #1 06-19-20261134×1080 140 KB

LITTLE SNITCH INSTALL SHOT #2 06-19-2026912×118 28.4 KB

The screenshots were informative. My guess is that there may be a conflict between Little Snitch and NetBarrier.

Yes, I have Intego’s Net Barrier. I have just turned it off. Hopefully that will resolve the issue. I’ll let you know how it goes. Thank you!

Doesn’t Net Barrier have the same functionality as Little Snitch? Specifically, can’t you configure Net Barrier to block Nisus Writer from communicating with the Nisus servers?

I’ve been trying Pages as an alternative, and it’s a disappoint. It seems to always start in its native format, which is not good for something that I use for note-taking because many things can’t open it. Another problem is spellchecking. It’s primary mode is Autocorrection, which corrects as you type without any notice, which I consider not acceptable because easily mangle names or words without you noticing it (a potential disaster if you’re writing something important). Turn off Auto-Correction and you get a quite limited spellchecker that I cannot get to accept my changes permanently. Maybe I’m missing something, but it does not look good to me.

If you are primarily interested in note-taking, have you tried TextEdit or Bear?

Thanks, but I didn’t mean that kind of note-taking, more a simple word processor like Nisus Express. Pages is close, but its spell-checking is problematical. I want something less complex than Word.

I hesitate to suggest it but Scrivener is really, really good. It’s been in continuous development for over twenty years. Professional novelists, screen writers, technical writers are enthusiastic users. The reason why I hesitate is because, on first sight, it is wildly complex and people are overwhelmed by the complexity. But it can be used very simply (you just ignore all the other stuff). The overall goal is to facilitate writing and eliminate distractions and if you just use the basics it does just that but backs up the simplicity with the fancy stuff if you need it. What trips people up on first use is they expect it to function like Word. It doesn’t. It wants you to write and the formatting, fonts, etc. are handled later in the compile stage (they provide compiling templates for standard things so you don’t really need to think about that unless you’re starting on a 500-page opus that you’re sending direct-to-print). The introductory tutorial is excellent, BTW.

You get a 30-day (non-consecutive) free trial. Might be worth your while to poke around.

Dave

I hope the app is better than the website. I had to disable all my ad blocking, and Stop the Madness, just to get the store to open. I wanted to go to the Store because there’s no Pricing page. When I tried to read their “How does our Licensing work” page, it hung Safari. Trying to download the trial resulted in:

Screenshot 2026-06-20 at 8.04.07 pm1118×212 12.8 KB

It might be wonderful software, but my first impressions aren’t good, and poor websites from developers don’t inspire confidence. I’d genuinely like to try it, but right now I have no option but to pass.

Works fine for me and I have Stop the Madness and an ad blocker running.

Dave

Scrivener is terrific. We do our first drafts of all our scripts there. A bit of a learning curve at the start for sure but an excellent tool.

That sounds promising to me. Generally I prefer to write first and worry about the formatting and fonts later – although things like writing fractions may require some formatting). Scrivener sounds like it’s designed for people writing for publishers who have their own preferred formatting. Word is designed for people who are delivering a finished product (such as a letter or a report) to non-publishers.

It’s sort of more complicated and the opposite of this generalization, at least in certain domains of writing and publishing. As an academic writer, I often need to take care in the formatting at the start – in my particular field, that includes tables, complex interlinear transcriptions, figures with multiple panels, tracking and auto-numbering references to tables, figures, and examples, working with my reference manager, and more. I need to submit manuscripts to publishers with formatting so that reviewers can clearly see what I am presenting. I tried Scrivener at one point. It just was not workable for this kind of writing.

True, the publishers have their own styles. I have to follow each publisher’s style guide for how to format citations in text and in the reference section, use of footnotes, writing style for figure captions, etc.The typical request is to submit to these publishers in Word format. Upon acceptance, after review, the manuscript is sent to their production department, where they use their own fonts, styles, etc.

I hate Word, and I don’t use it. This means I write in my preferred tool, which at one point was Nisus, and then Mellel, which is what I use now. I then convert to Word, double check that everything migrated correctly, and submit in Word. This is for major scholarly publishers such as Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Elsevier, etc.

This is peculiar, isn’t it?

Why on earth are academics spending vast quantities of time doing typesetting? Shouldn’t they be thinking about, I don’t know, ion transport instead of which font to use for the quote?

I am dumbfounded by the huge interest in arcane typesetting and book production software by academics and others. Why are you doing this? That’s not your job! Yes, it’s wonderful fun to write arcane codes that produce elegant books but that’s not your job!

Well, it is your job, now, because nobody’s willing to pay up for good editors and typesetters who will do a splendid job of producing your work for an audience. It’s weird. This whole thing started when word-processing became easy enough that secretaries were no longer needed (grim business communication has been the result) and now specialists are having to learn publishing arcana in order to be published.

Not sure this is a good use of time.

Dave

Well research has to be presented and how it is presented is a key part of providing a trusted level playing field for peers in that field. Most academics are not picking fonts, rather they’re following guidelines on what is widely deemed a default presentation.

Scrivener does a good job of aiding that.

It’s an interesting topic. On the one hand, I’m just barely old enough to have been present to watch the transition from watching Vice Presidents shift from formulating presentation ideas on a yellow note pad, discussing them with a staff member, and letting the staff member run off and make slide…to watching Vice Presidents hunched over their keyboards, wrestling with building their own PowerPoint presentations. All these years later, I’m not sure that has been the win it was supposed to be.

On the other hand, academics have been using TeX to typeset equations for almost fifty years and using reference managers to format footnotes and citations for nearly as long, and I am one of them. Or at least I was.

Yes, absolutely! Modern software is wonderful for that.

And yet, somewhere around here I have a meteorological journal from the early 50s with one of my father’s papers in it that consisted of stat camera reproductions of the typewritten manuscripts with handwritten equations and hand drawn graphics. Seemed to work for them…

Dave

Agreed. One of my consulting gigs in the early 90s was converting the slide production service at Argonne national labs to desktop tools. The existing system was really elegant but they were excited about how quickly things could be produced with the new desktop publishing systems.

Dave

Word, like everything else Microsoft makes, is bloated and makes it very hard for one to make the program work the way I want it to, while Nisus is filled with options that make it easy. Also, because of visual difficulties, even using Apple’s Accessibility program, I find it hard to accomplish what I wish to accomplish with Word. I used to use it all the time but that was before it became so complicated. It is just a personal issue for me.

I’m not sure it is that specific in what it blocks. I will check that out with Intego, a really valuable program. On the good side I am expecting a brand new iMac which might make it easier to install Little Snitch when I get it. This iMac has had so many problems that Apple has once again recommended I get to the Genius Bar to solve software issues. Time for the new one lol. Thanks for your suggestion.

As a (retired) meteorologist this interests me. Maybe I have read that paper!

Which people were surely complaining about at the time.

Two observations–

(1) Even back when I was in college in the late 80s, the math/ chemistry/ physics building had a single office with a couple of secretaries serving the entire building in place of a previous system where each department had a separate secretarial office–I suspect that these days academic secretaries are even few and farther between. It was clear that lots of things that had in earlier years been drafted by faculty–often in longhand–and then handed to secretaries for typing and reproduction were now being done on computers by the faculty themselves. On one hand, this was a shift of labor from less expensive staff to more expensive faculty. On the other, this left faculty with a library of reproducible documents (e.g. syllabi, assignments, and exams) that could easily be updated and modified from year to year rather than starting de novo.

(2) I remember many years ago reading an article about–if I recall correctly–the production of architectural proposals. It noted that while computerization meant that a simple proposal that took many hours to assemble in the past could now be replicated very quickly, the standards and expectations had also been elevated. That simple proposal would now be rejected out-of-hand, and the more complex, detailed, and attractive proposal that was now expected did not represent any real time savings. Basically, the implication was that a given proposal would mean a given amount of effort was expected, and the quality of the proposal was expected to reflect the same amount of time and effort as before even though the tools were better.

Another recollection: Not long after the university set up its first public-use LaserWriter in the computer center, I wrote a paper for one of my classes, but I formatted it using my roommate’s Mac to look like a journal article and printed it on the LaserWriter. My TA refused to accept it, since obviously no student would be capable of generating such a work without some sort of cheating or access to unreasonable resources.

I helped pay for grad school in the 1990s by creating camera-ready copy for Humanities faculty submitting to journals and publishers, following the style guide given to faculty authors. A first I used MS Word, then Page Maker, and finally Quark Express. It wasn’t until the late 1990s early 2000 that they accepted digital submissions for editing, porting to Quark or sometimes, Frame Maker.

Like Dave, I have no problem with Literature & Latte’s website running Stop the Madness and an ad blocker (latest versions of Tahoe and Safari).

I second Dave’s remark. I’m an academic historian, and it has been nearly 2 decades since I adopted Scrivener as my main drafting and revision tool. I keep notes in DevonThink, manage references with Bookends, and write in Scrivener. When I’m ready to submit my work, I compile the Scrivener project to a Word file, scan it to turn my temporary citations into properly formatted ones, then send it off.

My subsequent revisions are generally in Word, because that’s what my editors and publishers expect.

I’ve experimented a bit with free, open-source alternatives (e.g., Zettlr for note-taking and drafting, Zotero for reference management, LibreOffice for word processing), but I really don’t have the time to master them.

If anyone is interested, I did a presentation to my department’s graduate students about my academic research and writing workflow; you’re welcome to take a look at the accompanying handout (PDF) if you like.

Brian

Me too! (waves in history!) I use Devonthink, Bookends, and Word, the latter largely to skip the exporting process for publishers.

I do use Scrivener for some note-taking purposes.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I have been finding Word increasingly frustrating, but what really bugs me is the separation of the Review process from the general writing process (under Home). That makes me switch from the normal HOME mode to REVIEW to do some kind of editing. When it was introduced a few years ago, I didn’t notice the change until I tried to do some types of editing and it wouldn’t make the changes at all. This makes me very interested in trying Scrivener but leaves one question: what is Scrivener’s native file format?

It’s strange becau

Just try it, see if you like it. But give it some time…

Its format is proprietary but it exports to a huge range of formats, it plays well with others.

Ah, my eldest is a historian too DEVONthink and Bookends are his key tools.

Scrivener’s file format is actually a bundle that contains file structure, metadata, and your text. The text is stored as RTF files in subfolders and can be retrieved by opening the package and navigating to the individual folders containing the RTF. The text is tagged with Scrivener’s internal structural references, but those could easily be stripped out.

Also, looks like you may have hit post before completing your thought:

Brian

Oops. I had tried to delete an earlier idea and missed it. Thanks for the explanation about Scrivener’s file format. I have had past problems losing access to files when old software no longer worked.

I’ve had those problems too—perhaps you remember FullWrite Professional? I try to ensure now that I use applications whose data are accessible even if the app no longer runs, and that allow export to open file formats. I’m increasingly using Markdown in apps that support the format.

I have had past problems losing access to files when old software no longer worked.

Still counting here. It’s now less than a week left before the registry expiry date for nisus.com. The domain will expire on 2026-07-07 at 04:00 UTC if nothing is done to prevent it. As I also wrote on the Nisus forum: The world of writing has been a better place with Nisus. Seeing it vanish is tragic.

Well this is a sad sort of vigil to be holding.

Regardless, if you’re a Nisus Writer user, it would probably be a good idea to download and back up a copy of the installer package somewhere, just in case you ever need to reinstall it. This may well be the last chance for you to get a known-good download.

FYI, I was reading the latest newsletter from Mellel yesterday when I noticed that they are offering Nisus users a two-year “crossgrade” license to Mellel for $51.75. Scroll down their store page for the offer.