Has Nisus disappeared?

Posted by Amontillado
Oct 23, 2025 at 02:12 PM

I am nothing if not a bundle of contradiction. Eliminating distraction boosts productivity. I like to write in a text window without menus, toolbars, status bars - just me and my prose.

At the same time, it bugs me if I don’t have good control over styles. Composition and appearance need to be separate. Nisus was reasonably good at that, only lacking page styles controlling headers and footers.

It was reasonably fast, too. It took files beyond 200,000 words to start to bog Nisus. Mellel is faster. There’s no need to edit multi-million word files, but if you did, Mellel will respond as well with a two million word file as with a two thousand word document. Vim would be more capable yet, but any of them will handle very large files.

BBedit’s Notebook files are nice for desktop publishing projects. I think Notebooks are a great extension to what a text editor needs to do. You can do pretty much the same thing with a BBedit project. Individual files might be safer, too, although I’ve never lost anything in a BBedit Notebook.

Editing in BBedit or vim - or emacs, long ago - is great. A word processor with good style support lets me revisit a document and adapt its appearance. Not often a need, but nice to be able to do. The same thing can be done with formatting via DTP, but that generally means two copies of my stuff. The DTP file and my text file. It’s too easy to make minor edits in the DTP file, losing the plain text file’s validity as a source file.

I just realized I didn’t get Nisus migrated to my new Mac. I guess if I can go a month without using an app, it’s probably no longer critical. A shame - it disappeared and I didn’t notice.

MindNode and iaWriter are two more I may cull. I’m more likely to reach for OmniOutliner than MindNode. I do most of my Markdown in Devonthink, I’ve got BBedit, and I probably don’t need another Markdown editor.