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).

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.

Satis, I don't disagree. It's a shame, though, a sort of regressive modernization.

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.

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.

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

(Paywalled)

Nice thread – worth remarking that when I’m not writing in Obsidian (very much my standard go-to nowadays), I use Growly Notes instead. One of the most impressively efficient Mac apps ever, totally free of charge, with many of the same features (albeit not as sophisticated) as Curio, but one of the smallest footprints of any app anywhere (just 25 MB in the Applications folder!!!).

Works like OneNote, in the sense that every page is a canvas. While it doesn’t have an “import” function as such, you can drag and drop pretty much anything into it. Documents (e.g. Word, PDF) can be embedded – and immediately become searchable. Other things (e.g. Excel) can be copied and pasted – Excel tables are fine. And you can export pages, sections or entire files in various formats, including “high-fidelity” (PDF, HTML) and “flattened” (RTF, RTFD). Oh, and it’s got a nice search function, diagramming tools, tags, templates, favourites, page links, etc. How the developer has stuffed all these functions into something as tightly programmed as it is, I have no idea.

Alas, it’s only available on Mac (but then, that applies to Curio too). It’s a pleasure to use, the developer is very amiable (ex-Microsoft, and clearly an efficiency fiend!) and also produces other useful apps (Growly Draw, Growly Write, a whole bunch of games, a backup tool, etc.), all free of charge, regularly updated, and downloadable from growlybird.com

As a pleasant and ultra-efficient working environment, I thoroughly recommend!

Cheers,
Bill

There might have been some glitch. But they are reachable now. Both the forum and the site is operational.

The Mac App store doesn't seem to have the products listed anymore.

The only app listed by them is Nisus Thesaurus.

macosxguru

I'm fine with a certain nerdy view of future proofing. If I can recover my work with a terminal window, the Finder, and possibly a few lines of Python, I'm not worried.

If there's a wild-eyed raggedy-bearded survivalist path out of an app, cool.

I find I give Curio a pass on that rule. It's never lost data for me and while I generally lean toward function over presentation, Curio will keep my interest up with a polished view of my stuff without requiring much effort on my part.

@macosxguru - good to hear about Nisus. I hope it has a resurgence.

There are strange goings on at Nisus.

https://tidbits.com/2025/10/25/nisus-writer-schrodingers-word-processor/

The Tidbits folks have been using Nisus forever.

macosxguru

Written by Joe Kissell who authored 'The Nisus Way,' owns the 'Take Control of' line of Mac-related ebooks, and is close to the devs because Nisus is 'mission critical' to his ebook creation process.

But it doesn't look good. As Kissell writes, "Martin Wierschin, Dave Larson, and Mark Hurvitz (each of whom was the public face of Nisus Software at one point) are no longer at the company. Jolanta is in her late 80s, and Jerzy is older than Jolanta. As best I can determine, Jerzy is not actively involved with the business anymore, and Jolanta’s involvement appears to be minimal. I don’t think there are any other employees left at Nisus Software."

Apparently the last dev who worked on Nisus is now at Apple.

As usual on forums several ignored Kissell saying he'd considered the other contenders and they spat out recommendations for the usual suspects plus inappropriate options like text processors. (I'm on a music forum and just watched someone ask about experience with a specific piece of hardware, and most of the replies were about alternatives - typical.)

I see at the moment the Nisus site delivers a bad gateway error indicating the server behind an application gateway is in need of a little care.

Or, that could be spinoff from this morning. Godaddy and other prominent sites were inaccessible from here. My understanding is a DDOS event wreaked a little havoc.

Nisus has fostered a lot of writing and creative thought. It deserves better than what's happening now.

I wish there was an effective way to send feedback. Not to offer a stranger's annoying advice. I wish I could express gratitude.