The top level in the formatting hierarchy is User-Defined Styles. In Nisus, the term Style in this context does not refer to paragraph formatting per se

We turn now to the bottom level of Nisus, the area where the nitty-gritty is, the stuff that Nisus seems truly made for: the find-and-replace and macro/programming facilities. You set up a find or find-and-replace in a dialog window, and the flexibility of what you can do is astonishing

The macro facility is divided into two levels, referred to as Macros and Programming. The difference is formal: the two levels involve different commands, which cannot be combined on a single line of a macro (though they can be combined within a single macro), and the Programming Dialect requires the presence of a special interpreter file

We now come to the top layer of Nisus, a number of miscellaneous page-layout features cobbled together (a recent MacUser refers to it as a "Swiss-Army knife," an apt comparison)

by Matt Neuburg -- [email protected] (with comments by Adam C. Engst -- [email protected]) NOTE: My original review was too long, so Adam decided to cut some of the detailed technical discussion

One senses Nisus's originality from the moment of starting to type. The blinking insertion point vanishes and does not reappear; lines of text after it do not move out of the way as you type, but are temporarily ignored

The text window can be scrolled vertically or horizontally. Icons at lower left and upper right of the window allow you to: split it horizontally or vertically (or both at once, giving four panes and four sets of scroll bars); show or hide a horizontal and/or a vertical ruler (a unique and occasionally invaluable feature); toggle between text and graphics mode; or show or hide a row of page, line, character, and memory information

Menus, too, show the originality of Nisus's philosophy. A number of menus are hierarchical. You can make the Macros menu and the Windows menu pop down directly from the title bar of a window with a click while holding down the option or command key, so you don't have to go to the trouble of finding your way in from the menubar

To quote from the excellent movie "Spinal Tap," "it's a fine line between clever and stupid." I may have fallen off that fine line in writing TidBITS-114, because despite a few clues and hints, the fact that it was indeed our annual April Fools issue appears to have gone generally unnoticed

Oops -- [Open cultural mouth, insert foot. R.P. Aditya writes to set me straight on my analogies in TidBITS-113. Thanks for the correction, I really do appreciate it

DiskExpress II/SuperLaserSpool Conflict -- Jonathan Feinstein of Shrink2Fit Software has contacted us again to report an oddity that users of DiskExpress II and SuperLaserSpool 3.0 may face. DiskExpress II, a disk optimization system extension (actually, it's a control panel) from ALSoft puts up a dialog box the first time it runs on your computer during the startup process

Apple released version 1.1 of the System 7 Tune-Up extension last week, and they strongly recommend that everyone using System 7.0 or 7.0.1 use it. Tune-Up 1.1 replaces version 1.0, and you do not have to install 1.0 before 1.1 or anything strange like that

Novell, long a leader in the DOS networking software market, announced today that they have purchased International Business Software, a Macintosh software company that publishes DataClub, a popular package that allows Macs to share portions of their hard drives as a single, network-wide "virtual server." IBS and Novell have been negotiating for the last few weeks and finalized the deal late last week

I'd call it chilling, but others may have even stronger words for a recent proposal which could reduce the moderate level of privacy currently enjoyed by American computer users (along with American phone users)

Late last week, Apple announced to its dealers that it will be offering a free protective battery case to all existing PowerBook 140 and 170 customers, as well as including one of these cases with each PowerBook 140/170 and 140/170 battery sold in the future