We're in a spot where Microsoft Word has lost its strangelhold on the word processing market and other alternatives are doing well. But before it got to that level, Word had competitors then too. One of them was Nisus and I knew it well from writing news stories in computer press that covered it. I'm not sure I ever tried it myself, though I must surely have done at some point, but I had and still have a high opinion of it for two reasons.

One is that Nisus introduced some features that all the best word processors now have – and yet which took them all years to adopt. I'm thinking chiefly of non-contiguous selection: the way that you can select this sentence, scroll down a bit, select another one and then when you copy or cut, those two sentences are taken.

But the other reason I rate Nisus without having much or maybe any direct experience of it myself is that it used to engender passion in its users. Nobody ever evangelised Word. But Nisus had its champions.

And now it does again.

Things turned around in 2011 with the release of Nisus Writer Pro 2.0. This was the first version of Nisus Writer to include both change-tracking and comments, plus most of my favorite features from Nisus Writer Classic and a bunch of new capabilities. All of a sudden I had my old toolkit back, in a modern package. It was as though I'd been limited to a machete and an open fire for all my cooking needs, and then walked into a fully equipped restaurant kitchen. In the years since, it has grown even more capable and reliable.

Tools of the trade: Why I prefer Nisus Writer – Joe Kissell, Macworld (21 May 2014)

The full piece is very interesting about Nisus's place in word processing history – and even its lore – but also specific about its advantages. If you're on a Mac and you dislike Word, take a look.