Has Nisus disappeared?

Posted by Paul Korm
Oct 24, 2025 at 08:32 AM

The New Yorker recently published a short piece by Kyle Chayka on the beauty of Apple’s TextEdit app:

Kyle wrote:

>“I trust in TextEdit. It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does; it doesn’t hawk new features, and it doesn’t demand I update the app every other week, as Google Chrome does. I’ve tried out other software for keeping track of my random thoughts and ideas in progress—the personal note-storage app Evernote; the task-management board Trello; the collaborative digital workspace Notion, which can store and share company information. Each encourages you to adapt to a certain philosophy of organization, with its own formats and filing systems. But nothing has served me better than the brute simplicity of TextEdit, which doesn’t try to help you at all with the process of thinking. Using the app is the closest you can get to writing longhand on a screen. I could make lists on actual paper, of course, but I’ve also found that my brain has been so irredeemably warped by keyboards that I can only really get my thoughts down by typing. (Apparently my internal monologue takes place in Arial typeface, fourteen-point font.)”

Made me nostalgic for WordStar, again.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/textedit-and-the-relief-of-simple-software

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