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Has Nisus disappeared?
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Posted by Amontillado
Oct 22, 2025 at 02:00 PM
I’ve been visiting the Nisus forums pretty often. They have been dormant for a year, as has been customer support.
I was once very smitten with Nisus. I’ve kept watch at its bedside.
Today, both Nisus’ main site at nisus.com and their forums return a requested URL not found on this server error. A wild unsubstantiated guess is the hosting agreement expired. It disappeared from app stores in the last week.
Nisus is still installed on my system, but retired. I haven’t used it for anything new in a long time. Fortunately, Nisus is future proof, using RTF for its native format. It’s not standard RTF but it’s close enough.
Life goes on. Borrowing from Rush, who borrowed from Simon and Garfunkel, the words of the prophets are still written in academic halls (with Mellel).
Posted by satis
Oct 22, 2025 at 05:54 PM
The Nisus apps were removed from the Mac App Store and both nisus.com and nisustech.com are offline. From what I understand someone close to the company’s owner was said to have been trying to bring the business back up but that was around the summer, and I don’t know if the owner is still with us or what’s going on now. Nisus’s original programmer I believe sold or moved on to other businesses, and would be in his mid-80s now if he’s still around, and Nisus’s current CEO would be in his mid-70s.
When people still standardized on word processors and printing things out Nisus and Mellel stood as the main Mac alternatives to Microsoft Word. (And before that were apps like RagTime, FullWrite, WriteNow [much better than Apple’s MacWrite, and Apple almost bought them], and AppleWorks. Nisus was in existence back in the 90s too, I think.)
But with the preeminence of PDF and the rise of Google Docs, text/Markdown apps and formatting, and LibreOffice (and Apple’s inclusion of Pages with all its computers), the need for paid, old fashioned word processors that aren’t from Microsoft has practically disappeared. People who write books either use Word or text-based apps they then port into Word because the publishing industry standardizes on Word’s track-changes in editing.
Posted by Amontillado
Oct 22, 2025 at 10:04 PM
Satis, I don’t disagree. It’s a shame, though, a sort of regressive modernization.
Posted by satis
Oct 23, 2025 at 12:54 AM
Amontillado wrote:
>Satis, I don’t disagree. It’s a shame, though, a sort of regressive
>modernization.
Perhaps. The platformization of writing can alienate authors from their labor. But it also perhaps can be seen as adaptive modernization, the evolution and democratization of textual communication and culture.
Classic word processors gave near-total control over formatting, structure and revision. Sometimes extremely useful but their layers of complexity were overall confusing overkill for most people for most uses most of the time. In business that freedom was often curtailed anyway, restricted through templates and via simplified menus imposed by some Support department to limit functionality and enforce document standards that tamed the feature glut and complex, icon-laden toolbars in most popular word processors.
I think there’s probably always been more appetite for simplicity and immediacy when writing than for the kinds of heavy features seen in word processors but much word processor feature bloat is the result of devs ftrying to offer all possible functionality to appeal to cash-flush business users, and fighting their competitions’ feature checklists.
It all made for a higher barrier to entry to just write casually or creatively, which is why lightweight (and cheap!) text-based apps on the desktop and the cloud became so popular. I think a lot of that came with the rise of free Google Docs for education use, which trained a lot of teens who carried it forward and can’t imagine using a real word processor today.
I’d rather write in a lightning fast text processor than the cluttered word processor alternatives out there. I’ve put hundreds of thousands of words, maybe more, in BBedit on Mac, and Ulysses and Drafts on Mac/iOS. I’ve tried to use word- and page-processors to write in but they feel sluggish in performance but also in spirit.
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.