Merge with What Product/Sector?

[tedg]

Supposing that Nisus survived, and it merged with another product/sector to revolutionise document creation and management, what would that product/sector be?

[Vanceone]

Probably law.

The only real place WordPerfect survives on the PC side is for attorneys, with some specific legal features that blow Word out of the water.

There's nothing similar on the Mac side. I'd LOVE a Mac version of "Perfect Authority" and automatic bates numbering. Some document automation. And the WordPerfect Mac community (still running strong since 1997!) has built some amazing things with their macros and the like. Nisus could fill that role with a code base less than 30 years old.

If Nuance actually cared about Mac use, legal or medical dictation would be a gold mine too.

Alas, not to be, I guess.

[Amontillado]

A broader question is what should any surviving word processor merge with? It's a shrinking market. Some kids graduate high school without having seen anything more useful than Google Docs.

Here's a toast to 2026 - Long live word processors.

[adryan]

G’day, all

That is certainly a thought-provoking question.

My first choice would be BBEdit. I used to use NWP for coding Web pages, but BBEdit is specifically built for such purposes and I much prefer it. But it is not really suitable as a WYSIWYG word processor, which is where NWP shines. BBEdit has a great implementation of grep and does lightning-fast search-and-replace over multiple files. Even more so than NWP, it has comprehensive support for AppleScript. In fact, Bare Bones Software could well provide a new home for NWP, whether or not the two applications are somehow melded into one. Given that for BBEdit’s own survival Bare Bones Software has to keep abreast of relevant changes to macOS, it may be well placed to perform the same service to maintain NWP. Although BBEdit is able to interact with an FTP/SFTP server, I prefer Fetch’s interface. Combining the three products into one could create an attractive proposition for many users.

Continuing the technical theme, I think there is potential to have NWP provide a much more user-friendly facility for incorporating mathematical and scientific expressions than is available in specific-purpose formula construction software. The Special Characters Palette is very handy, but it could be augmented by a separate high-level menu (called “Mathematics” perhaps) with, among other things, commands for baseline alteration and non-standard lateral positioning of characters (so that “subscripts” could appear directly below “superscripts”, for example).

Finally, AppleScript affords the opportunity to link disparate applications into something akin to an “office” suite. A strategic alliance among suitable software manufacturers could be beneficial for them as well as for users. NWP could be a key component. AppleScript scripts could be provided explicitly, or they could be summoned implicitly by menu commands in each application.

All the best for 2026.

Cheers,
Adrian

[xiamenese]

I think that if NWP were to be picked up by a developer in a related domain, my answer would be Affinity. NWP is closer to page makeup than to app coding. I have had the Affinity suite since its launch, though I haven't upgraded to v. 3 yet—I'm holding off for the moment as v.2 basically does all I need. I'm waiting to see what develops under Canva.

But I wouldn't want to write anything of more than a couple of pages in Publisher and so use NWP. However, tighter integration between NWP and Publisher would be most welcome. To have a fully-fledged writing environment like NWP whose output was directly accessible in Publisher, the way Photo and Designer are linked, would be a fantastic addition.



Mark

[Vanceone]

If anyone were to pick up Nisus, I would not be surprised to see Omni do it. Adding OmniOutliner into Nisus would be fantastic, and bring back shades of old FullWrite Pro, which had a killer outliner too. You'd start with a strong outline using OmniOutliner and then just write it with the Nisus stuff.

Plus, Omni actually implemented (and might still have it, I don't know) Nisus' attempt at bringing the old System 7 feature "Publish and Subscribe" into Omnigraffle, so they are already at least somewhat familiar with Nisus code.