When it comes to writing tools, Mac users have more choices than ever before. From Microsoft’s Word to Apple’s free Pages, to many dozens of the trendy and minimalist distraction free writing tools, we’re awash with word processors.
What there are fewer of these days is the classic word processor for writers. One of my favorites, and one that still sits proudly in my Applications folder, and graced my Macs since back in the last century, is a bit of a throwback to the golden age of feature rich word processors– Nisus Writer Pro.
This is a tool for writers that brings into the 21st century all the tools writers need, including fullscreen, distraction free modes, but with the list of features we need to format the document.
Yes, Nisus Writer Pro has a toolbar, and a sidebar of even more tools. Take that, Simplenote.
Think about what today’s genre of minimalist distraction free writing apps do not have– table of contents, watermarks, tables, style sheets, comments and indexing, footnotes and endnotes, macros, mail merge, built-in drawing tools, line numbering, change tracking.
That’s a minor list of the professional features that real writers have come to expect in a tool to create real documents, or a real story– fully formatted the way God intended. For the sake of compatibility, Nisus Writer Pro uses the much loved Rich Text Format (RTF) as the native file format, but it also opens and saves Microsoft Word files and other formats.
Nisus Writer Pro is try-before-you-buy so you can see if all that power is worth the extra expensive, but there’s a nicely appointed and highly capable Express version for almost half the price of the Pro version, itself very capable.
Distraction free and minimalist word processors made be the trend, but a professional writer prefers a professional tool, and Nisus is one of the best.