Goodbye Nisus, it was nice knowing you

[David Sharp]

As many regular users of this forum will know, Nisus has for over a year been a zombie company, visible intermittently via this forum and a web site, offering products that are no longer updated and therefore likely to cease working when Apple releases a new system update. Definitely not recommended for purchase.

For anyone visiting here for the first time, the situation has been elegantly summed up in an article on a different Apple-oriented site: https://talk.tidbits.com/t/nisus-writer ... ssor/32216

For myself, the answer to the question posed in a separate thread on this forum, "Is Nisus moribund?" has been clear for some time. Unless whoever remains in control of whatever remains of the company agrees to make the code open source, Nisus is dead. Yet another example of what the SF writer Cory Doctorow has called "enshittification".

(The early 20th century economist Joseph Schumpeter flatteringly described the development processes of capitalism as "creative destruction". In my not-so humble opinion what we are witnessing today is more like "destructive destruction", of which the demise of products like Nisus is an example.)

To cut a long story short, I'm out of here. On the technical level I've decided to transfer my many text documents and writing projects to Apple Pages.

I have no particular desire to engage in endless discussions about whether or not this is the best choice, but if anyone wants to contact me for some other reason you should be able to locate me by typing "David Sharp Paris" into your preferred browser.

Best wishes to all

[David Sharp]

Un article en français sur la disparition de Nisus :

For French-speakers, there's an article on the demise of Nisus on the "Macgeneration" site:

https://www.macg.co/logiciels/2025/10/n ... mac-304557

[xiamenese]

Un article en français sur la disparition de Nisus :

For French-speakers, there's an article on the demise of Nisus on the "Macgeneration" site:

https://www.macg.co/logiciels/2025/10/n ... mac-304557

Hmm. Doesn't add any new dimension to our concerns. What I found most intertesting was how rapidly the comments moved away from the question of Nisus to a more general discussion of the way text processing and IT abilities is going amongst junior office staff.


Mark

[Amontillado]

If any here are interested, I'm slowly writing a style guide to Mellel, addressing the things that make Mellel appear to have a learning curve.

Grok a couple of basics and Mellel is suddenly about as hard to use as Windows' Notepad app.

Assuming I ever finish the darn thing, I'll share with former Nisus forum colleagues. I'm not offering anything for sale here. This is just a helping hand for fellow Nisus diaspora. Here's a throwaway, hide-my-email address if anyone wants to get in touch. If spammers figure out genomes-dollies-9i is working on icloud.com, I'll discard it.

"Dollies" in that email address? Um, sure, why not?

I loved Nisus. Mellel lacks some features. Captions anchored to images are said to be in the next release or two. In the meantime, that's a manual process. Easily done, but not optimal for large works.

Mellel excels in other areas. On the whole, I'm happy and I can play tricks with Mellel documents. For instance, I can fill out Mellel's probably little-recognized Story Points feature and have a document that populates an Aeon Timeline file.

The upcoming feature I'm most looking forward to is the ability to filter what most word processors call headings, producing a Scrivener-like experience, focusing on just one part or segment of a document.

Excluding headings from output is also on the map. I plan to use that for notes within documents, what Scrivener would call the Research folder.

Best of luck to all, particularly to Nisus. Arising from ashes is not impossible.

[joao]

I"m not planning on doing any switching at this time. NWP is working well, and my guess is that it will continue to work with a number of successive OS releases. I could be wrong, but I'm hoping.