Subscription Model

[B.Otter]

Right. Nisus has some squeaky bugs and a few cosmetic issues. But, the fact that the most current version for many, many months is a "beta"?

The product and support seem moribund to me. For a subscription model to make sense, it would require responsive support.

With regret, I must agree with those whose readings of the tea leaves lead them toward investing time and effort in alternative platforms. I rarely come to Nisus, now, when I need its well-honed macro level tools, for which I shall be grateful for as long as they work. (Maybe time to dust off the sed and awk manuals?)

Brad

[xiamenese]

I have been using Nisus Writer since it was first launched for OSX, moving to NWP when that became available. I have tried various other word processors at times, and currently have Mellel, Pages and LibreOffice, but always I come back to NWP, as it's by far the most comfortable. I don't really consider myself a power-user of NWP, and the "squeaky bugs" mentioned, whatever they are, don't seem to affect me.

That said, I too am one of those who would most likely move away if NWP went subscription. I do have a few overtly subscription apps, like VPN, and I have to admit to some that are "back-door" subscriptions where another year of upgrades must be bought to continue to be up-to-date. But more and more I think about sticking with the version I have without paying for further upgrades. But any major app that would cease to work if the subscription wasn't paid would go straight in the bin. And such subscriptions as I have, again with the exception of the VPN, don't really seem to be any better in terms of upgrading/bug-squashing than others.

I just wonder if the recent silence from Nisus and that the current version is still beta, is that they are working on a new version based on Apple TextKit 2, which I understand from other sources is in the pipeline (Apple TextKit 2, that is). But that's just speculation.

Mark

[tedg]

Þorvarður —

I am sorry to have abandoned the thread to which you contributed. I do at least owe you some expansion and explanation of the features I quickly listed. I’m sure I would come up with a different list today, based on a specific project.

Some not in your list of ten:

A way to create and edit docs on iPad. Pages, Word, and now Mellel do this. Countless other text editors as well, including the two I use. Bookends, Devonthink, Aeon, and Omnigraffle are there as well, all my current Mac power tools.

A way to style list paragraphs separately. Mellel does do this.

Custom ligature tools. Mellel does some of this I think.

A completely rethought way of anchoring images. And I should say anchoring and styling figure titles. I am comparing this to Framemaker, which just worked. Nisus doesn’t and is frustrating. I don’t know how Mellel does, but it seems to be frame based.

The ten you picked:

I understand that you wrote your remarks in an abbreviated form, but that makes it also difficult for me to understand. Of your 32 remarks, I picked out 10 which I’m going to go through now one by one.

(1) Internal comments that can have directives

Do you mean inline comments? And what kind of “directives” do you have in mind? Remember, a “comment” is already an established term in the Nisus lingo.

I mean a comment say to myself that says: ‘rewrite this paragraph to emphasise Wille’s contribution.’ And it won’t let me publish until it either understands that I have done what I want or asks me if I have.
Or a comment that says ensure no double spaces are present and if I visit it, it checks and removes them.

(2) A conditional 'stamp' UI for macros

Not sure what that means. Perhaps you mean that if you start typing “if” in a macro, you want Nisus to automatically display the if-then structure so that you just have to fill in the blanks?
If that’s what you mean, then create a macro glossary with all the commands you find difficult to remember. Include examples and images/screenshots (!!) so you can easily see how to use them. An example: whenever I type “ifthen” (without the quotes) my macro glossary shows me:

If expression1
code1
elsif expression2
code2
...
elsif expressionN
codeN
else
codeDefault
end

I actually had this for Classic using OneClick. Under certain conditions including a trigger, a palette would appear with the relevant operations, mostly macros. There was some intelligence to this.

(3) Collapsible TOC

Why do you want that? TOCs are usually not longer than one page, so why do you want to collapse them? If I find a TOC distracting I just cut it out and paste it into an empty document. Or I delete it; recreating it should not take more a second.

I’ll assume that in every case you wonder why I would want something. In this case, I write longish documents that have reasonably complex ToCs. In editing/writing, I move things around a lot. Some subsections become sections. In many of my documents, I get to choose what is listed in a ToC to be relevant to the flow, and a PDF navigation tool. I’d like to remove subheaders from the ToC selectively by simply collapsing the parent. Hope that is clear.

(4) some write room/drafts capability so that I can do general writing for other apps

You mean a sort of extra writing pad for notes? I have sometimes thought about that too. But, then I realize that I already have such writing pads. I have created a small note-pads and To-Do lists which I keep in the Document Manager and they appear in the upper-left corner of my screen when I type a certain keyboard shortcut.
Ideas that pop into my head and I think are worth permanently saving I write down in Nisus and then save the (usually short) text with a macro directly into DEVONthink. I save it as .rtfd, NOT as .rtf, because then images in the file can be displayed by DEVONthink without any problem! So, my recommendation is: never save .rtf with images into DEVONthink.
Before I save the file, I write hash tags at the end of the document. Those hash tags are recognized by DEVONthink and are automatically transformed into real DEVONthink tags.
Based on the tags, a smart rule in DEVONthink can automatically move the document into an exact location in a DEVONthink database.
So, in other words, Nisus and DEVONthink work seamlessly together.

Let’s say that Nisus is tuned so perfectly that I want to do all my writing in it, and use mail as an example. I used to be able to use Bbedit to seamlessly compose responses in Mailsmith. (And before that Haskell-Mode in Gnus.) Wherever I am, including this web response field, I want to hit a command and have everything imported into NW with my cool styles for me to write, and on completion have it imported back. QuickCursor and WriteRoom did this briefly.

(5) Internal latex/mathml

Nisus’ policy is, not to try to do tasks that other programs can do better. If I need LaTeX I would use a LaTeX program, not Nisus. But that’s just me. Don’t know what other people think. But I imagine that it might be possible to write LaTeX code in Nisus with the help of a glossary.

Well, if you need LaTeX you can go elsewhere. If I stay in Nisus, I want to work in Nisus.

(6) Inbuilt PDF editor

Are you referring to the options “Insert as Image” and “Insert as Text” that appear when we drag a PDF into Nisus?

No. This is part of a larger inclusion request. Inclusion is way cool. I say, go to a source, and find an area, and show that area here in my document as if I created it here. Tinderbox can do that for web content or file URLs, but only importing text. I want the styles as they are, especially if in a PDF. But in that case, it still needs to be editable.

(7) Conditional styles

Not sure what that means.

I have a case today. I have things set that if I hit command I, I apply an italic style that uses a different typeface than the surrounding text. If I reassign the surrounding text from body or normal to say block quote or parenthetical, I want the style to conditionally adapt according to a rule I set — in this case, use the non-modern version of the face.

(8) Invisible highlighting

Why would one want that? We can create styles that have no attribute other than their name. They can be searched. Or do you mean a feature to hide text? I remember Nisus Writer 6.5 had such a feature.

I want to be able to mark text with attributes that only I can know to search for. Why? Most of what I write is for myself, but much of that goes into published docs. I want the power of having deeply annotated text without having to remove it as the doc evolves. That includes marking text for the directives of #1 above. Think of it as named highlighting that can have notes and macros assigned.

(9) More novel multi-window management than Apple provides and is better than tabs

Yes, that would be good. However, there are quite a few utilities that do exactly that.

Um, I think we may have different views on what could be novel or possible with one screen. Try out programming Xmonad with an AI assistant and see some magic.


(10) Animated font effects in editing mode

Why do you want that? – I saw that long time ago; I think it was in MS Word. The letters were red and it looked as if they were on fire. I think it was meant for presentations or the Web. Is that what you mean?

This one you picked is purely fun, but that’s because I want things to be pleasant, but I also take font faces quite seriously. If for instance I misspell receive as recieve. it isn’t because I got the word wrong and a word needs to be substituted. I got the letter order wrong, and I should see the letters move.
If I have set a directive that before I sleep, I must fix something or risk loosely that thought, I want it to remind me. I want the text as a living thing to remind me.



+++++++

A way of typing links generally, internal AND external.

Sidebar and general frame management.

SGML.

Some of the amazing editing novelties being explored by Bike.

A rethought document manager.

More elaborate/powerful Linkback that integrates with the internal drawing tools.

A spell checker that isn't a decade-old paradigm and that uses the hidden thesaurus.

AI-advised syntax highlighting in certain paragraph styles.

A more modern, unique and tailorable UI.

Deeper integration with Bookends for source notation.

An outliner that understands typed paragraphs and that uses personalised ML to extract headers for use in the nav panel.

Something other than PERL (jeez).

A macro editor with more power and sense, possibly integrating with keyboard Maestro and others using a macro API Nisus devises.

Conditional local kerning.

Secondary font management.

The return of Classic's asian gloss capability (furigana for English).

A rewrite in SwiftUI and experiments — no matter how initially silly — on foreground/background views in VisionOS.

[Þorvarður]

I replied in your Mellel thread
viewtopic.php?t=12669

Since we are now talking about feature requests, I believe this topic should better be dealt with in a separate thread, or still better, many, individual threads: one thread for each feature request. That would make things more readable for other forum members. It’s not a good idea to cram 32 items into one thread.