Unless open source, other folks codebases tend to be cursed things (not to be critical, just from experience!). I wouldn’t have high hopes unless it’s super profitable.
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I don’t know about “most people nowadays use Google Docs…” I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. I have been using the Typst web app, though. It’s the best way to learn Typst as you get instant feedback on what you’re doing. But I’m now nerving myself to set about finalising the template(s) I’ve created, and then to set up a Scrivener project template based on them, which is my real goal.
As for taking over the Nisus codebase, I can understand where you’re coming from @Shell even though I am not a programmer. I also take your point about the question of profitability. In general, I would guess that expanding the Nisus user-base has been one of the problems over recent years. People seem generally entrenched with what they have and know — aren’t we all — and I think of the number of posts on this forum over the years which, in essence, run “I wanted to get away from Word and I’ve found Scrivener,” followed up later by “Why doesn’t Scrivener work like Word?”
If you’re used to Word, NWP is different, and so people are reluctant to change as the two occupy the same space, as do Mellel, and LibreOffice. We, NWP-users are no different; the thought of switching to Mellel or LibreOffice is daunting (no one on the forum has spoken about moving to Word!).
I suspect that what the vast majority of us Nisus-users would settle for is for someone to take it over so as to maintain compatibility with future changes in MacOS, rather than develop it further.
Mark
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I’ve stopped using Nisus years ago, when the UI started to look really unpleasant and very much alike any open source program out there. It no longer looked like a modern Mac program.
It’s a shame, since the basic concepts are still strong, and there are a few utilities (selection, search, comments, document comparison) that have no equals. I really hope that the current version will continue to work forever.
It would be great if the more peculiar concepts were integrated into Apple Pages, but I know that Apple is very unlikely to add the more exoteric features.
Paolo
But they could incorporate some things into Pages, and the more esoteric stuff into a new “PagesPro.” (My pet fantasy.)
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The recent acquisition of Pixelmator makes one suspect that Pages Pro might actually exist, sooner or later.
But will it focus more on page design, than on advanced text elaboration and correct representation of semantics?
Paolo
I hope for a little bit of both; the more advanced features of NWP and more advanced desktop publishing and design tools.
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Agreed.
If you really look around there are an awful lot of carcasses laying around of once-popular, innovative software. Why aren’t more of them resuscitated? Because of @Shell 's codebase curse. If the software is substantially more complicated than a simple skin over OS functions, having a new team take it over is a huge investment: months & months, even years of familiarisation. You won’t make that investment unless the profits are certain or you are convinced that the new features you have in mind will cause an explosion in sales.
Dave
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I’ve been following this thread with some interest - and sadness.
I can’t speak highly enough of Martin Wierschin, erstwhile Nisus developer. It would be difficult to quantify the amount of help he’s given me over the years. Outside of Apple, he was the number one expert in TextKit, working wonders with it in Nisus, and he was always generous in sharing his knowledge, both over email and in public forums.
I actually wondered what had happened to him. We used to exchange regular messages after WWDC events, often despairing over what was going on with TextKit, but I never heard back from him after 2022 - which now makes sense if that was when he left the company. (It seems that he worked at SpeedTrack after Nisus for a while, which is another company owned by the Nisus founder - strange they moved him off Nisus when he was the expert.)
Hearing that Martin now works at Apple, my one beacon of hope in all of this is that they have unleashed him on TextKit, and we’ll soon start seeing some serious improvements. Is it too much to dream that they’ve got him creating tables in TextKit like he created for Nisus? Of course, it would be Sod’s Law that with all of Martin’s expertise in TextKit, Apple has got him working on Animojis or Image Playgrounds instead. 
As for Nisus, it’s not exactly great if, as Joe Kissell surmises, they are continuing to sell it without anyone actually still there working on the product.
Ha, I would love to get my hands on the Nisus codebase. Making an offer is sadly out of the question, though, because:
- I doubt we could afford what they’d want for it.
- Nisus has some very loyal and devoted customers (such as xiamenese), and we would not have the resources to serve them as they deserve. As has been observed above, taking over a huge codebase like that is a huge investment in itself.
- Buying it (in the alternative universe where we could afford it) only to carve it up for Scrivener 4 would again be a disservice to Nisus customers.
The only hope, if it’s not bought, is that they do make the code open source. I like to think that if Scrivener ever met the same (apparent) fate, where it was no longer a viable business and there was no one left to code it (hopefully I would be ancient by this point!), we would open source the code and let it live on beyond L&L.
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Mellel is offering a discount for Nisus Writer users. (USD$51.75; down from USD$69.00)
I found it in the comments section of this article I posted earlier.
I just downloaded a 30 day trial of Mellel; I like its potential as a book formatter (non-fiction and fiction.)
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Despite the current situation of Nisus, I think Jerzy Lewak deserves both his retirement, and a big thank you from all of us for having been able to compete against some giants and offered this tool for so long. I must add that his newsletter, full of Center-European humour from another time, was really a good read!
Paolo
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