Alt Software for Writers

[loulesko]

The uncertainty surrounding NWP sent me on a search for alternatives.

I found Storyist.

If you're a novelist, it's great software. The developer is responsive and Storyist is still actively being developed. I've been using Storyist about a month and it's been great. The bonus, for me at least, is it can do screen and stage plays. The ability keep assets with the project—something I thought I'd never need—has proven to be incredibly convenient.

Food for thought for Nisus refugees feeling anxious over the lack of communication from Nisus.

[Amontillado]

I have a Storyist license from long ago. It's still valid, I need to take another look.

Do you have any tips or tricks for getting started with Storyist?

The outline feature looks interesting. I need to read up on how that works.

[loulesko]

Top 5 tips for getting into Storyist:

• Don't let all the features overwhelm. They stay out of the way unless you need them.
• Don't go down the rabbit hole of trying all the features either. Just get to writing and then see if you can use them. I was surprised that I adopted the character sheets—I don't us all the fields, but the little photo things and quick summary about the characters is great for keeping organized.
• Existing forum posts are a great source of help.
• Play around before you go deep on your own project.
• This dude has a good multipart series about Storyist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfR6YwY-9Es

Give it a try, I think you'll like it.

[Amontillado]

It does look nice. No dependency on cloud storage, which is great, and I don't see anything about AI - even better!

I'm skimming the online manual.

Thanks for your comments and that link.

[loulesko]

My pleasure.

[xiamenese]

Everything that @loulesco has said about Storyist is equally true for Scrivener, though Scrivener separates the writing process from final formatting. As you know, I've been a Scrivener user since 2007, and have never used Storyist.

At a quick look at the Storyist website, it's probably less flexible than Scrivener, but if you are writing fiction or screenplays and WYSISWYG is important to you, then Storyist will suit you better. But if you are writing academic or technical papers and books, or if you're doing translation, Scrivener will probably be a better choice, though you will have to accept a slightly different way of working bringing a slightly steeper learning curve.



Mark

[Amontillado]

Scrivener is awesome. It's why I bought a Mac long ago.

I fell off the Scrivener bandwagon with version 3, but please don't take that as criticism of Scrivener. I found swapping style sets in Nisus was a sufficient subset of Scrivener's compile and Scrivener's styles support didn't resonate with me. Nisus spoiled me. The fault isn't with Scrivener.

Either Scrivener or Storyist is far more integrated for things like outlining than Nisus or Mellel plus a note taking app, but I cope. When I first started creative writing, my "scrivener" had three rings that clacked open and shut. Ghastly how primitive the world was just short decades ago.

Ghastly how much I cling to the past, too. My favorite human interface device for my clacky "scriveners" has a nib and draws ink from a bottle.

[xiamenese]

I fell off the Scrivener bandwagon with version 3, but please don't take that as criticism of Scrivener. I found swapping style sets in Nisus was a sufficient subset of Scrivener's compile and Scrivener's styles support didn't resonate with me. Nisus spoiled me. The fault isn't with Scrivener.

I think that Scrivener's styles system is one of the hurdles that puts people used to WYSIWYG word processing off, as it seems unnatural to have the main body of your text marked "No Style". But that is fundamental to the ability to compile to different outputs without having to wrangle with style assignments for each. In fact Scrivener styles work beautifully with NWP (everything "No Style" in Scrivener compiling to "Normal" in RTF for NWP).

The other thing is that so many people want Scrivener to compile to final layout and think opening the output in a word processor like NWP, Mellel, Pages, Word or LibreOffice is too much trouble. I find that hard to understand. (a) Scrivener is designed for the writing process, not the page-layout process (though for simple, straightforward layouts it works well enough), and (b) I find that going through my texts in a different format helps me spot typos and other inconsistencies. Even with texts I write direct in NWP, I print to PDF and then read through that, inevitably finding things I need to go back and change.

But yes, we all have our own preferences and idiosyncracies; Scrivener doesn't suit everyone… I'm not sure I've managed to persuade any Mac users on the Scrivener forum to move from Word to NWP!

Mark

[MacSailor]

I've got the latest versions of Scrivener, Nisus Writer Pro and Mellel (and also Pages, but that's another story). I have tried to use Scrivener several times over the years, but I have finally come to the conclusion that the way Scrivener works, may not be my way of writing or organising my text or the way I produce text. It's a really good software, but we are maybe not compatible with each other.

Both Nisus Writer Pro and Mellel are more in line with the way I handle texts and words, even if I have been trying very hard to get used to Scrivener.

When it comes to NWP and Mellel, I have a hard time to choose between them. I really like both of them and they hard their pros and cons. It has always been easy to get in touch with the people behind the software in both cases … until lately. Now it's quite hard to get in touch with the folks behind NWP (hope it will a change later on so that Nisus will not be orphaned some time in the near future).

[loulesko]

I prefer Storyist to Scrivener, only because Scrivener was a bit overwhelming on features for my sensibility. Storyist is a fantastic balance.

Also, I prefer the Storyist UI—a thing of beautiful minimalism.

To be clear, this is like comparing a Porsche to a Ferrari—we are very lucky to have so many great writing tools available for the Mac.

I am sad about NWP. I put a lot of time into my macros. But, there it is.

[Amontillado]

Scrivener's No Style struck me as just another style, something like what I would call Body.

Mellel didn't seem viable at first. Learning just a couple of things, though, put everything in place. I confess Mellel has become very important to me. What I thought was hard is now transparent and it's very powerful.

I once generated four million words of Lorem Ipsum in a Mellel document. My Macs, old as they are, would scroll smoothly end-to-end. Finding a single unique word anywhere in the document was plausibly instantaneous. No visible delay.

Anyway, my habit is to rely on styles for all text attributes, at least as much as possible. That's something I picked up in Nisus and it is really helpful. I wouldn't go about writing any other way. Not only is it flexible, it adds a little more to the separation of styling and content.

Now, my aging Macs won't run anything later than OS 12. One part of me wants to export my Devonthink databases to plain files and folders and revert back to Linux. I'm not a Libre Office fan, so I might look to vim and an output processor in lieu of word processing. Either Scribus or the obvious, LaTeX.

Probably, I'll stick with Mac.