3.378 Nisus (50)
Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@VM.EPAS.UTORONTO.CA)
Mon, 21 Aug 89 20:31:12 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 378. Monday, 21 Aug 1989.
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 89 00:23:42 EDT
From: elli@harvunxw.BITNET (Elli Mylonas)
Subject: Re: Nisus
I haven't used Nisus, but i have used Qued/M, the editor put out
by Paragon, extensively.
As i understand it, Nisus is a respectable word processor with the
following exceptional features. Its files can be opened as text
files by any other WP, because it stores information in the resource
fork of the file, not in the data fork, so other programs cannot see it.
I assume that if you then start saving it as a Word Perfect or MS
Word file, that Nisus may be rather shocked when it tries to open it up
again.
Also, it contains the full power of Qued/M, and then some. This means
that it has an editor that understands regular expressions, and in
which you can create and store macros built out of these regular
expressions. It has multiple clipboards, and can not only have
multiple documents open at the same time, but can have macros that
can operate on more than one at the same time (find something in on,
then alter it and put it into another.
My guess is that this is why they advertise it as a text-base. It
has a good enough editor that if you set your file up right, you
can perform good retrieval.
I wholeheartedly endorse Qued/M, and use it freguently to tag text files.
I don't know into what formats Nisus can export to, and it is not that
well known or extensively used. That is for me a serious drawback, since
i want the ability to transfer files around. And i am fairly sure
that it doesn't have an plain-text way of representing format that is
equivalent to RTF. Also, again, judging from Qued/M, the interface
may be a tad bizarre and unMaclike. These people are clearly coming
from the UNIX world, and build good tools, but hadn't yet realized
why the Mac does standard interfaces the way it does. Open file dialogues
and menu configuration is strange.
Also, Nisus does not have styles like MS Word. It does have global search
and replace on format characteristtics, but that isn't usually good
enough for a large document.
This is all i know about Nisus, i would very much like to hear more.
If a text base is all you need, you might make do with Qued/M, which
is a marvelous, if at times confusing program. The word processor,
though, has not yet been proven in the field.