Nisus.com returns a 404. I don’t own Nisus Writer Pro, but was considering a purchase next month should there be a Black Friday/Cyber Monday discount. A few weeks ago I was perusing the NWP forums and there seems to be considerable concern regarding the company’s future (and much wailing and gnashing of teeth if NWP ceases development.)
I checked whois records, the site’s renewed through July 2026.
Yes. Jerzy Lerwak, who created Nisus, has moved on or retired, Mark Hurwitz has retired, Martin Wierschin now works for Apple.
Apparently, Joe Kissel of Take Control Books has been in contact with Jerzy Lerwak or his son, with a view to possibly acquiring Nisus, but nothing more has been heard about that.
It’s all very worrying.
I’m on Windows 11 now, but I used Nisus for a while when my Mac worked. It was a really nice software.
It’s possible that the open source community can create an RTF-based word processor with a similar UX to Nisus if they band together. Or we start a #SaveNisus campaign.
According to “A.I.” everything’s just fine:
That is, of course, unless you try to visit the Nisus website, their forum, or, God forbid, want to install Nisus Writer from the App Store, etc.
Hmph. Still rude to just let the site 404. Putting up a simple “closed due to retirement” page would have taken 5 minutes of work.
I can’t really comment on what’s happened to the site. It was working last week. I think there have been a few times over recent months when it has been inaccessible for a short time. I will just wait and hope that something will be posted on it to tell us what’s going on. But the domain was secured until something like July 2006.
I’ve been using Nisus Writer (Pro) since it’s first launch, somewhere around 2003. Before that I did have Nisus Classic, but preferred Word 5.1a. When Apple shifted to OSX, I had to find a replacement for that, and Nisus Writer became my go-to word processor.
Mark
Here’s a stupid idea, and probably too stupid to happen: what if Apple purchased Nisus? Might not Apple consider NWP and NWE to be useful additions to iWork, most likely with NWExpress as a code source to make Pages more robust and NWP rebranded as “PagesPro?”
(Go ahead, laugh.)
I was a devoted user of Nisus Classic and even delayed moving to OSX for a couple of years because I was so wedded to it. (I still have the manual in 5 spiral-bound volumes in their original case.) When I eventually moved to OSX, I found that Nisus Writer Pro was not yet sufficiently developed for my needs. I then discovered Mellel and have been using that ever since, although I have kept my copy of Nisus up to date. It would be sad to see it disappear completely.
I can understand that. If Word 5.1a hadn’t been so good, I would have been using Nisus Classic. I even persuaded the School of Languages where I was working at the end of the 1980s to 1999 to set up a lab of Macs with Nisus, so that students of Chinese, Arabic, Russian and other languages would be able to word process their essays easily… it was of limited success as the word got round to the rest of the university that we had a lab of Macs and non-languages students ended up hogging the machines all day long!
When Microsoft produced the infinitely awful Word 6, I changed briefly to Nisus Classic. Soon after MacOSX was launched and I switched to that. But my problem was that I needed to be able to import Word documents in Chinese; Mellel looked very promising, but it couldn’t import them (it was a number of years before that was enabled) so I had to open the .DOCs in TextEdit, save them out as RTF and open that in Mellel.
Shortly after, an app called Opito Composer became available which was more feature-rich than TextEdit (though not quite as rich as Mellel) and which could open .DOCs directly, so I started using that. After about a year, that was bought up by Nisus and its developer (Thomas Jolley, I think) went to work with them and shortly after Nisus Writer was launched, so that was when I started using NW(P).
I have kept Mellel up to date, and if Nisus does fall by the wayside, I’ll probably use that. It’s a very powerful, if somewhat quirky, word processor, but for me, NWP wins hands down for three reasons: (1) it is built on TextKit and, like Scrivener, it’s native file format is RTF, so it works flawlessly with Scrivener: (2) its in-built macro language, which means I can compile from Scrivener to a standard RTF file and use an NWP macro to apply a style collection to set it up for whatever target I have, basically with three clicks of the mouse or keys; (3) though slightly less important, it’s multi-key shortcut system!
Mark
As I said, some of the more tech savvy people could try to create a Nisus clone if something happens to it. FOSS can be a life-saver in those situations.
Hold my beer.
What if Literature and Latte purchased Nisus? I’m sure Keith can handle one more project. *takingcover*
I briefly thought of that but lacked the courage to suggest it. You da man.
The Nisus website is back up and running. I’ve just downloaded v. 3.41 (the latest version), which I’ll keep as a back up in case I ever need to re-install.
Nothing there to say why it was down for a few days. I am not going to speculate!
It’s not available on the App store, though (nor is Mellel), so if you think you might want to try it, download it now.
Mark
I suspect that, if Apple purchased Nisus, in spite of the fact that Martin is now working for Apple, they would “do an Adobe”, i.e. promise to maintain it and continue to develop it but then dump it within a year!
In a fantasy world, they could strip out, or even better reuse/develop some of the bells and whistles like the amazing macro language as a separate app, and then launch the basic word processor with its proper tables and lists as TextKit 3!
Mark
Another fantasy idea:
KB buys the rights to Nisus Writer Express and integrates what he can of that into Scrivener 4!
Mark
Or why not the Affinity suite? It’s a bargain at $380 million and probably only a third of that for Publisher alone (the most logical “missing piece” for a complete workflow beyond Scrivener). I trust L&L way more than Canva.
I’ve had a reply from Joe Kissell who says the Nisus.com site should be up again, but it needs work to make sure it stays up. He’s been talking to Staś Lewak (Jerzy’s son?) and trying to find out where things are going.
KB buying the rights to Nisus and integrating it into Scriv4 would be a good idea
Article by Joe Kissel.
Three important points:
Thanks for that. We can only wait and see.
Mark
Kissell is right, I think, not to be optimistic:
