For more than a year, we’ve heard scattered complaints: problems with Nisus Software’s website, particularly the user discussion forum; slow or absent responses to support requests; assorted bugs; and other issues. But earlier this week, on 22 October 2025, the reports changed to: “Did you know the Nisus website is completely down, and that Nisus Writer is no longer in the Mac App Store? Does this mean they’re out of business?”
On the one hand: The site is back online as I write this. The app still works. I’m writing the first draft of this article in Nisus Writer Pro on a Mac running macOS 26 Tahoe, and it’s fine. You can still download it and buy a license. At least one person is actively involved in the company, to some extent. It’s (mostly) alive!
On the other hand: All available evidence suggests that development and support for Nisus Writer have ceased, and barring some new information, its future is doubtful. It’s (mostly) dead!
[…]
Martin Wierschin, Dave Larson, and Mark Hurvitz (each of whom was the public face of Nisus Software at one point) are no longer at the company. Jolanta is in her late 80s, and Jerzy is older than Jolanta. As best I can determine, Jerzy is not actively involved with the business anymore, and Jolanta’s involvement appears to be minimal. I don’t think there are any other employees left at Nisus Software.
The latest update to the app was on 12 November 2024, and it appears the last time a Nisus employee posted on their discussion forum was also in November 2024.
It’s an odd situation, with no public activity in nearly a year and the apps removed from the Mac App Store but still available for purchase from the Web site.
And a sad one. Nisus Writer was the coolest demo I saw at my first Macworld Expo in 1992 or so, and it remained a great app through all of Apple’s transitions: PowerPC, Mac OS X, Cocoa, Intel, 64-bit, Apple Silicon, etc. But over time it became my favorite app that I no longer actually use. And I suspect that usage declined for others as well. iOS and Markdown brought a revival of apps that use plain text. And most people who need rich text don’t need the power of Nisus Writer. The more basic use cases got squeezed by Pages, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs, which are free and/or ubiquitous. But for those who need it, there’s no clear replacement:
True, there’s no shortage of other Mac word processors. I’m sure that for many people, any number of them would be perfectly adequate. However, if you’re the sort of person who needs the tools that only Nisus Writer provides, none of that matters. Although I can’t speak for anyone else, I can definitely speak for Take Control Books, and we would be unable to do what we need to do in any of those other apps. Users who have built up libraries of complex macros in Nisus Writer, or who require find-and-replace based on style-sensitive regular expressions (to take just two examples) would be seriously hampered by another app.
Here are some forum threads discussing the state of things:
Previously:
Update (2025-10-28): John Gordon:
We are in the dark ages of word processing — Pages is buggy and incomplete and Word for macOS is eye-bleach.
Seems like an ignominious demise for a once-great app. Nisus Writer has been an acclaimed Mac-only (and Mac-assed) word processor since 1989. I never got into it, but I could always see the appeal.
As he says, one way to think of it was like a BBEdit for rich text. (The developers had previously built a plain text editor called QUED/M.) But while I prefer BBEdit, there are many plain text editors that can do regex processing, and there wasn’t really anything else like Nisus Writer.
Update (2025-10-30): Eyal Redler:
In the 90’s I used to be a Nisus user and I liked it a lot. It’s true that as a Hebrew speaker, I had very little choice - nobody supported Hebrew well (or at all) except Nisus and Claris Works, but Nisus was also a very solid application.
Mac OS X rendered the classic Nisus (and many other apps) obsolete, and the complete lack of any Hebrew support on Mac OS X seemed like an opportunity, which I grabbed, and with my brother Ori started to develop what was to become Mellel.
It took a while for Nisus to introduce their version for macOS, and by that time we had made a lot of progress and were quite a bit ahead, but they caught up rapidly and, in some areas, went further. It is fair to say we drew some inspiration from the classic Nisus and, I think it is also fair to say, they draw some inspiration from us.
Mellel and Nisus share have quite a bit in common: we’re both what you might call a “traditional” word-processor, are geared towards academic and scientific writing, and we’re both small players in a world of giants, trying to compete as a paid product against products that are often licensed by institutions or given away for free.
Another thing we shared is a considerable chunk of customers who used both applications. It is always nice to know there’s room for everybody.
We’re not sure what’s going to happen with Nisus and we hope they recover - we can all flourish together. In any case, we would like to offer Nisus users the chance to get Mellel at a discounted price — $51.75.
Business Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 Nisus Writer Pro Sunset Word Processing
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