I have been using Nisus Writer since 1993! Back in the early Mac days. And it was awesome, especially because it worked with the most amazing Regular Expression engine and so forth. The app was pretty much the reward of academics, coders, and general erudite worshipers of language, especially foreign languages. Nisus had the best dictionaries and everything. And Nisus still is above and beyond other text editors and word processors. Amazing. Still.

I'm always amazed to see small developers continue to exist and make great products and stay in business in this shark infested waters of office productivity suites.

Now that NWP 1.4.2 has been fixed by Nisus and functions well on Lion I can post a rating that I believe is appropriate for this excellent word processor. It is well worth the $79 initial purchase price, but I still don't think 2.0.1 is worth a $49. upgrade fee. Remember, too, that the full purchase price of Mellel, which is a better word processor, is $39. Nisus' unique search capabilities and its ability to work seamlessly with DEVONthink make it indispensable for me.

Just the best word processor for Mac OS X.

Easy to use, rich, and : uses the RTF format. I think it matters.

Nisus Writer Pro is a _very_ good word processor. As noted below, its comments and change tracking are compatible with Microsoft Word. Built-in drawing features, auto-numbering, table of contents, indexing, widow-orphan control, cross references etc. are powerful and easy to use. It uses the Open Office converter to import-export Word files so the compatibility with Word is quite high. (Import-export filter is selectable in Preferences between Open Office and Apple--Open Office is better.) It has the "classic" (Nisus products have been around for decades) Nisus features such as powerful (regex, I think) searching and a built-in macro language, neither of which you need to worry about if you don't want to. It uses style sheets (again, only if you want to) and has an innovative way of setting up and modifying them. This is a full-on Cocoa program which is saying a lot for the maker's commitment to the Mac as this took a full re-write of older code. Palettes live in a drawer and update depending on context--one of the most effective ways to provide features as needed. They contract/expand easily and scroll within the drawer, but little scrolling is needed since they are context-sensitive. Slick and pretty it is.

Picking nits a little, it doesn't have page thumbnails (but it does have a document navigator) or a split or other multi-pane view. I suppose you could take care of this by making a copy of Nisus and opening both on the same file. Also, it does not intelligently place floating objects, such as at the top of pages or columns. However, in the last few days I have been evaluating all Mac options for a technical paper I plan to write and in this respect (smart float placement) Nisus is exactly on par with all the others, even Word. (I was stunned to learn this, especially about Word. I wrote with FullWrite Professional from 1988 to probably 1998 and it handled this job with aplomb. For technical writing with rigid layout requirements from the publisher, LaTeX via LyX looks like a very good option but with some set-up and learning involved.)

Word compatibility is better than Pages while at the same time NWP provides more power and thus converts more aspects to-from Word (using OO converters).

Using NWP is a pleasure and does not cause my blood pressure to increase like it invariably does with Word. Nice job.