[NewsPoster]

The very name Nisus may bring you back to the 1990s and if it doesn't, then one look at the software possibly will. That's cruel: it is nothing less than fantastic that Nisus has survived where so many other word processors have died, crushed under the force of Microsoft Word. So this version, Nisus Writer Pro 2.1 should be celebrated. It's just that there is something a tiny bit old about how it looks and feels.

This word processor has been plugging away since its first version in 1989 and it's gone by different names and through all kinds of regenerations in that 26-year lifetime. For all that it has felt like it slips under the radar and for all that its diehard fans are as passionate about it as Apple's always have been, Nisus has always been a strong product. It was the first word processor to introduce non-contiguous selection and if that phrase is unfamiliar, what it does is not. The ability to select a sentence from this paragraph and at the same time select one from another chapter, that is non-contiguous selection and it took years for Word to add that.

Nisus Writer Pro is more the inheritor of previous Nisus word processors: it is a modern application, the currently shipping edition is version 2.1 and it was last updated just weeks ago. Yet even on first glance, before you've typed a single word, it feels like a much older application. There is something reminiscent of System 7 in the row of icons at bottom right. There's also something oddly reminiscent of the days when software kept adding features. So where today we get a stripped-back basic but powerful word processor in Pages, Nisus is a word processor with some serious number crunching ability. Its extensive and powerful macros include a Mortgage Calculator, for instance.

The range of writing features is bewildering. Nicely, the toolbar shows you only the most common ones and when you first start Nisus you go straight into a blank page with a blinking cursor. Yet Nisus comes with a Document Manager, a reading-level statistical analysis tool, a bookmark navigator and really everything invented in word processing in the last quarter of a century.

This is a deeply powerful word processor and its long term fans have been rewarded by it. We don't happen to enjoy writing in it as much as we do other applications and the best we can manage by way of explanation is that we feel hemmed in by all the features. Plus we'd have grabbed that document manager with both hands in the 1990s but now with the OS X Finder it doesn't feel as useful.

Your choice of word processor is a serious one because you will spend more time in it than anything else bar perhaps email. It used to be that it was a serious choice because the cost of them all was so high and now that's a factor but a hugely reduced one. However, it also used to be that Nisus was a valid and strong contender right alongside Microsoft Word and WordPerfect so it is good to see it surviving and hopefully thriving.

Nisus Writer Pro requires OS X 10.7.5 or later and costs $80 on the official site where there is a 15-day trial version too.

Who is Nisus Writer Pro for:
There is little this can't do from ordinary jottings to full-on books so for features there's probably not a writer alive who wouldn't like it. That said, feel is everything so do test out the trial version.

Who is Nisus Writer Pro not for:
Existing Pages users might be tempted by the greater features but would miss the ease of use they're familiar with. Word users probably have enough powerful features for them to make it not worth swapping.

-William Gallagher (@WGallagher)

[ADeweyan]

I'm sorry, I have never before criticized content on this site, but this "review" is absurd. There is very little here about actually using this tool, and anyone who thinks NIsus Writer is difficult to use hasn't actually tried to use it very long. Call it "old fashioned" if you like, but all Nisus has done is resist the wrongheaded iOS-ification of desktop OSX, and provided a word processor that is powerful and very easy to use, with a well thought-out and uncluttered interface. I can't stand using Word with its obtrusive interface that manages to both clutter your workspace with gunk and hide all the tools you actually need to use. I don't know what Pages is trying to be, but it's not trying to be something that makes it easy to write and format basic text documents.

This review can be summarized as "it uses colored icons. Ick," and that is not at all fair to a tool that is perfect for people who just want to get in and write something without having to struggle against an overly complex or foolishly simplified interface.

[Carrier Wave]

This an excellent app for heavy-duty, serious writing needs - including everything from short stories to dissertations to books and more. It's only real competition is Microsoft Word, but Nisus is easily the more Mac-like and user-friendly choice.

I like that it can watermark text. PDF output is great. File sharing with Microsoft is via RTF file format, which tends to get iffy when formatting gets complex.

Overall a great app, but I wish it took less than 3.5 years to get from version 2.0 to 2.1.

[Mike Wuerthele]

Originally Posted by ADeweyan 

I'm sorry, I have never before criticized content on this site, but this "review" is absurd. There is very little here about actually using this tool, and anyone who thinks NIsus Writer is difficult to use hasn't actually tried to use it very long. Call it "old fashioned" if you like, but all Nisus has done is resist the wrongheaded iOS-ification of desktop OSX, and provided a word processor that is powerful and very easy to use, with a well thought-out and uncluttered interface. I can't stand using Word with its obtrusive interface that manages to both clutter your workspace with gunk and hide all the tools you actually need to use. I don't know what Pages is trying to be, but it's not trying to be something that makes it easy to write and format basic text documents.

This review can be summarized as "it uses colored icons. Ick," and that is not at all fair to a tool that is perfect for people who just want to get in and write something without having to struggle against an overly complex or foolishly simplified interface.

I didn't write the Hands On piece, but I'm reasonably certain you didn't read the entire piece.

Your summary is WAY off.

[Sabon]

"I didn't write the Hands On piece, but I'm reasonably certain you didn't read the entire piece.

Your summary is WAY off."

Actually no, it isn't.

Here's another way to sum up what was written.

"I didn't spend more than five minutes looking at Nisus Writer Pro. I Google Nisus and found out how old it is. It can do pretty much anything but looks old."

I have licenses for no less than eight ... maybe more, word processors. Which one I use at any given time depends on my mood and what I need to accomplish. The funny thing is, the more OS X progresses the less I need other word processors because the features that I really like in Pages, being able to pull it up on any of my Macs, was introduced in OS X is saving to the cloud. Now I don't have to email versions of things I write to myself.

It's often hard for me to remember how powerful Nisus is. Yes, you can open it up and start writing and it stays out of your way including taking up very little real estate at the top and bottom. If that is old fashioned then give me old fashioned all the time.

The -only- thing that is missing for me is to be able to take notes at the side of the screen like Scrivener (and other "writer's tools") do/does.

The only way to be able to describe all that Nisus Writer Pro can do would be like trying to describe all the different great things about the earth. Okay, -maybe- a little over the top there. But if you want to do it, almost everything including the kitchen sink is in Nisus.

From a long time fan who was not paid to write this.

[Mike Wuerthele]

The hands on pieces are light touches about what we like and don't like about an application. Fuller reviews, we put in our reviews section, but I guarantee Mr. Gallagher spent more than five minutes with the app.

Your response here tells me that since you're a fan, you're upset that we didn't cover more features about Nisus that YOU like. If you want to write a more full piece, I'll even publish it for you on our main news page.

Fair?

[William Gallagher]

Hi,

I did write this piece and there is no part of it that I meant more than where I said it was great to see it surviving. Nisus survives because of its fans, I think, and they are right. They are also a barometer of how deeply important our word processors become to us: we pummel this software and we use it for hundreds of thousands of hours. It matters.

I didn't spend hundreds of thousands of hours on Nisus specifically for this piece but I spent days now and I have previously spent months with the software: I wrote for UK magazines in the 1990s and my specific beat was word processors.

It's certainly true that Nisus can do more than I covered but so can any software. Nisus is exactly as I said: extremely powerful and responsible for introducing features other word processors took years to catch up with, but also a bit old. I mean that most in the sense of its design and how it feels to me using it: I don't know if it's the same codebase as the versions I used twenty years ago but it's not exactly an OS X Yosemite look and feel. That matters to me.

William

[Sabon]

I understand what you are saying about it feeling old but I don't think it detracts from the software. That's for me of course. Everybody's opinion is valid for them.

I do know that in order to keep things "fresh" things have to change in order for most companies to be able to continue selling their products. Take a Ford Mustang for instance. They make changes to it every year, sometimes a lot more than others, otherwise they wouldn't be able to sell as many as they do.

Some of the changes, Mustang II, are just plan horrible. I'm not saying Yosemite is but MS Office and Windows since Vista (okay, maybe Windows 7 isn't --too-- horrible, but especially Windows 8, sucks big time.

Note that my job, and I get paid pretty well for this, is to keep up with MS changes in their OSs and their applications and to be able to answer easy to very deep in the system questions/problems as quickly as I can. I'm not talking about a call center but much MUCH more than that.

There is a difference between just adding features and adding bloated graphical UIs that get in the way, reduce efficiency (speed of find that feature you want) and just being bloated in how much real estate the Ribbon takes up and that poor excuse of a UI that is Windows 8/8.1.

I'll take an old looking and feeling piece of software like Nisus any day over the mess that is Microsoft. And I'm not saying that just because I'm a hater. I'm saying that because I love efficient, clean, ever --improving-- ... well anything.

The Ribbon is the Mustang II in this scenario and I gave the Mustang II a D- when it came out and was very dismissive of using the name of a very hallowed product on a pig with lipstick.

Which would you pick? A 1968 Mustang Fastback or a 1975 Mustang II?

[shawnde]

The hands-on piece also fails to touch on the most important feature of Nisus: it's multi-lingual input. It has had that ability for nearly 20 years (I still have the old version on 3.5" floppies), something that apparently, Microsof and Apple couldn't do. I think TextEdit has better right-to-left capabilities than Pages, but at least Pages does offer it in a crude way. MS Word has never had it, and never will. They can't even respect the basic OS X text API's to allow input in any language (Adobe is the same as MS). Also, when you say it feels "old", you must mean it has heritage. If anything Pages and Word feel "old" because they're sluggish as hell (Word is the worst). Nisus is a full Cocoa application with no fluff and no "cross-platform" code. It's the refined essentials of an app, tuned specifically for writing (not desktop publishing or presentations, etc.). It excels at what it does, and I'm very glad that it has taken them 3.5 years to go from 2.0 to 2.1. There is no reason to charge for unnecessary upgrades. When there is a feature requested, they'll add it. They're not run by marketing guys. Long live Nisus.