Nisus Writer: Schrödinger's Word Processor

Posted2 months agoActive2 months ago

zdw

58 points

28 comments

tidbits.comTechstory

calmnegative

Debate

40/100

AbandonwareLegacy SoftwareWord Processing

Key topics

Abandonware

Legacy Software

Word Processing

Nisus Writer, a beloved Mac word processor, is potentially becoming abandonware due to its aging founders and lack of clear succession, sparking concerns about the fate of mission-critical proprietary software.

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01Story posted
Oct 25, 2025 at 4:57 PM EDT
2 months ago
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Oct 28, 2025 at 12:45 PM EDT
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23 comments in Day 7
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Nov 3, 2025 at 7:03 AM EST
2 months ago
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Discussion (28 comments)

Showing 28 comments

bearsnowstorm

2 months ago

1 reply

For circumstances like this I create a VM with a version of MacOS that the app works with, and keep it on life support that way (doing this at the moment for Finale, music notation software that works well with Piano Marvel and thus gamifies piano practice for my kids…)

WillAdams

2 months ago

Yeah, that's what most of the Mac folks who want to run Freehand/MX do (I find it easier to just run it in Windows 11).

barrenko

2 months ago

1 reply

Never had a Mac, but damn I love their app product pages. Wanted to link, it may be HN hugged to death currently.

kalleboo

2 months ago

How about an Internet Archive link

https://web.archive.org/web/20250717090627/https://nisus.com...

quibus

2 months ago

2 replies

What freaked me out a bit was reading “100% mission critical”. I may not fully get the niche issues that the product resolves here but if it’s really 100% mission critical, I’d only use FOSS or make a mix of tools.

1313ed01

2 months ago

1 reply

In many ways being able to run something on a stable, well emulated, platform can be a better way to know some tool will always be around than to have the source code for the tool itself (even if that is definitely also a good thing). There is a much better chance that someone will e.g. keep maintaining some forks of DOSBox to keep it running than that there will be people around to maintain a specific tool. Not sure how that looks for MacOS applications? Of course support for running fully offline and without messy DRM is a must.

Frenchgeek

2 months ago

A quick search pointed me to https://github.com/darlinghq/darling

shrubble

2 months ago

The app is not activation-locked to a remote server, from what I can tell.

There is nothing stopping the author from buying a 2013 Mac Pro "Trash Can" with 64GB RAM, and running it in perpetuity. RTF import/export won't stop working, documents won't bloat beyond what 64GB RAM can handle, etc.

submeta

2 months ago

1 reply

What a beautiful app. Sorry to see it become abandonware soon. - Same happened to other apps like that. Years ago I used and loved Netmanage’s EccoPro as a personal information manager (PIM). It was an outliner, an address book, a database. Way ahead of its time. But it was abandoned.

I have used Nisus Writer Pro for several years, replacing MS Word for my personal text writing. And I loved it. Sorry to see that devs get older and cannot maintain it anymore.

Same is true for other apps that I heavily rely on. For instance DevonThink. I don’t know how solid the company is, what their future looks like.

lycopodiopsida

2 months ago

2 replies

> For instance DevonThink. I don’t know how solid the company is, what their future looks like.

Oh, they exist, but did a rug pull with a switch to half-assed subscription model last year, increasing the cost threefold over the same time period. But it is ok, we all know that making a proprietary software a cornerstone of your workflow is a long-term risk. I've dropped them and never looked back.

submeta

2 months ago

2 replies

What are you using now, if I may ask?

kstrauser

2 months ago

1 reply

Different person, but here’s what I moved to: https://honeypot.net/2024/05/31/retiring-devonthink.html

TL;DR I migrated back to the filesystem, with several smaller, more focused tools to replace DT’d functions in better ways.

I’d still be on DT but their pricing model is insane today. A $200 license gets you two computers. Have a work laptop, personal laptop, and an iMac in your home office? Too bad! Pick the one you don’t want to access your data on, or buy another license! LOL, no. They say this is to have pricing that’s “fair to everyone”, but apparently by being universally crummy.

deafpolygon

2 months ago

1 reply

This was basically my conclusion when I was evaluating DEVONthink earlier this year.

kstrauser

2 months ago

And it’s a pity, because DT is very nice. It’s not that nice to justify its exorbitant price tag, but still.

I’m glad they pushed me to using a Unix-philosophy collection of more focused tools, though. Each of those is better at their own thing than DT is.

lycopodiopsida

2 months ago

1 reply

A bunch of tools - Carbon Copy Cloner for backup, Cryptomator for syncing my docs to iOS, Samurai Search for searching through docs on iOS, Find Any File for search on Mac, and refiling... whatever, I've used a loosely hierarchical structure before, so I refiled with Alfred for some time, then I wrote a small script for dired in emacs.

Way happier now - DT did what I expected, but it was ugly, slow and cumbersome. Now I have a loose collection of tools and if I do not like Find Any Files, I can switch to ripgrep or whatever. Don't like CarbonCopyCloner? Take any other backup/sync solution, no problems.

submeta

2 months ago

Same here. Using lots of different tools. Many cli based. Yazi as file manager (TUI app), Houdahspot for searching fulltext plus preview, Hazel, and many more. Recently started migrating my pdf documents from devonthink to Obsidian.

andai

2 months ago

I was thinking the only option that makes economic sense for Nisus writer is a subscription.

If the market is saturated and they're not going to sell any new copies, then they're just going to go out of business.

If they have existing customers which want the software to continue to exist on an operating system designed to make existing software stop working every few years... then customers paying for the privilege of keeping the thing working on Mac OS seems like the only option.

(For reference, on Windows you can just run stuff from 1995 with basically no problems.)

I hate subscriptions as much as the next guy, but if something is mission critical and irreplaceable, the $15/month for "I need this to keep working" seems pretty reasonable. If there's a non-trivial number of people in a similar situation, maybe they could work something out.

unpopularopp

2 months ago

3 replies

I'm curious what does it do that Libre Office can't do?

I always have this strong preconception about proprietary Mac apps. When a screenshot tool costs for example $30

cowsandmilk

2 months ago

Sure, today, but this was originally released 11 years before OpenOffice was open sourced.

jhbadger

2 months ago

Nisus' killer feature back in the day was that it was a word processor that supported regular expressions for find and replace, which at the time were only found in text editors for writing code. But yes, LibreOffice supports that now.

kstrauser

2 months ago

I think this is a lot more similar to Scrivener, where it’s designed to manage huge, complicated docks in multiple sections.

andai

2 months ago

At this point it sounds like there's no one left at the company who still cares.

That would be a death sentence, even if the company had good financials, which it also sounds like it does not.

Open sourcing it sounds very unlikely in that condition.

The only thing I can think of is to switch to a subscription model. If there's enough people who rely on it and need it to keep working despite Mac OS updates. Then it seems fair to continue paying for development?

(If there's enough people like that, maybe they could organize something and contact the company... maybe)

pseingatl

2 months ago

Maybe it will be acquired by Canva and ported to Windows and Linux. I use Nisus all the time.

lastdong

2 months ago

Great story! Here’s what I gathered: The founders are in their 80s and may be completely retired. It’s unclear what their perspective is on open source or whether they have considered selling the app to someone (if that someone even exists) who would ensure the same level of dedication that they provided. The code might be legacy, difficult to maintain without a significant rewrite, so the costs of updating the app could be prohibitively expensive.

Now I am curious about what language it is written in, as well as the architecture and other details.

aeontech

2 months ago

I hope they find a way to open-source it! Seeing years of hard engineering work disappear into a black hole would be truly sad.

Jotalea

2 months ago

tl;dr: the site for this app has been down more than usual these last months. the company owners are already in their late ages. [anonymous] has been doing some maintenance to the site, but [they] don't seem to have enough access to the company's resources. OP has offered help on managing the app, updating it to add more features, maintaining the site/forum, etc. many times, for free, but got no response. with no official announcement, the situation is unclear.

gcanyon

2 months ago

I think Nisus was the app that had a fun About... window easter egg: if you did it with the option key down, little stick figures would assemble (or disassemble?) the dialog letter by letter, running back and forth frantically to do so.

Nisus also might be the Mac app that had the unusual scrollbars and basically no minimum size on the edit window.

You could make the window maybe 10 characters by 5 lines, and the arrows in the scrollbar would change to a smaller size.

Then smaller still and the scrollbar itself would get narrower.

Then smaller still and the arrows would change again, to simple triangles.

Then smaller again and the arrows would overlap and change to point right and left instead of up and down.

You could make the window so small only a single letter would display, then even a fraction of that letter.

Good times.

kragen

2 months ago

This is what happens if you make a proprietary app central to your vocation: sooner or later you learn you are a houseguest, not a homeowner.

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ID: 45706901Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 7:55:16 PM

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