BMUG PD-ROM BV3/BMUG PD-ROM Version BV3 (CDRM1097900).iso/Utilities/TidBITs/TidBITS 101-125/TidBITS#116⁄Nisus_Intro.etx

Text File | 1992-05-27 | 25KB | 454 lines

TidBITS#116/Nisus_Intro
=======================

 Thinking about upgrading to Word 5.0? Thinking about switching to
   a different word processor? Think about Nisus. Nisus is arguably
   the most powerful word processor to appear on the Macintosh, and
   it has features that no other program can even approach. Despite
   this incredible power, Nisus has some potentially serious flaws
   for creating complex formal documents. This review uncovers the
   power and the problems to help you decide which program to use.
   Part one of three.

 Copyright 1990-1992 Adam & Tonya Engst. Non-profit, non-commercial
   publications may reprint articles if full credit is given. Other
   publications please contact us. We do not guarantee the accuracy
   of articles. Publication, product, and company names may be
   registered trademarks of their companies. Disk subscriptions and
   back issues are available.

 For more information send email to [e-mail] or
 [e-mail] -- CIS: 72511,306 -- AOL: Adam Engst
 TidBITS -- 9301 Avondale Rd. NE Q1096 -- Redmond, WA 98052 USA
 --------------------------------------------------------------

Topics:
    Nisus Introduction
    Typing, Clicking, and Moving
    Windows
    Menus

[Archived as /info-mac/digest/tb/tidbits-116.hqx; 25K]


Nisus Introduction
------------------
  by Matt Neuburg -- [e-mail]
     (with comments by Adam C. Engst -- [e-mail])

  NOTE: My original review was too long, so Adam decided to cut some
  of the detailed technical discussion. But he also felt that some
  readers (including current Nisus users) might want these details.
  So in this version the tag <more> indicates the omission of
  material; the full version can be downloaded as
  TB/Nisus_Review.etx from sumex-aim.stanford.edu or your favorite
  archive site.

  Nisus 3.06, the dark horse of the Mac word-processing world, is a
  paradox. Devoted users world-wide swear by it; yet it remains
  relatively unknown, and in a comparative evaluation of word
  processors in the Sep-91 Macworld it was not ranked top in any of
  seven document categories. Nisus provides tremendous flexibility
  and incorporates features borrowed from far pricier page-layout
  programs; yet it lacks some basic functions necessary to produce
  acceptable formal copy. It comes with a powerful macro/programming
  language; yet that language is nearly devoid of fundamental page-
  description capacities. Nisus is a pure original, a rethinking of
  the philosophy of word processing on the Mac from the ground up;
  yet its creators often seem not to have considered the most
  elementary needs of word processor users. It is the best of word
  processors; it is the worst of word processors.

  Nisus is cobbled together from so many elements, and its look and
  feel is so different from other word processors, that only a large
  description can give a fair sense of it. Imagine Nisus as three
  worlds piled upon one another, of which we will explore each in
  turn. The bottom is the hugely powerful find-and-replace and
  macro/programming capabilities from which Nisus derived its
  earliest incarnation (QUED/M). The top is a suite of page-layout-
  like capabilities such as page placing, graphic characters,
  updatable cross-references, footnotes, indexing, and so on. The
  middle is the word processor itself, where you see, navigate,
  edit, and format your document. The find-and-replace and macros
  are solid and worth buying the whole program for, and the word
  processor milieu is a brilliant tool for entering and editing
  text, but the page-layout features are, on the whole, badly enough
  constructed that you could not use Nisus as your chief word
  processor for generation of large formal documents. Nisus styles
  itself "The Amazing Word Processor," but I view it more as "The
  Amazing Text Processor;" creating and editing text is a blast and
  a half, but building certain types of complex printable documents
  may prove almost impossible.

  Adam suggests that Paragon aimed Nisus not at the market already
  held by Microsoft Word, but at a hitherto unknown niche, into
  which he happens to fit nicely: a word-processor for someone who
  writes constantly but prints infrequently. He's interested in its
  abilities to create and manipulate text, and usually couldn't give
  a hoot about page layout or long complex documents. I think my own
  point is that Nisus is so loaded with features that ought to make
  it into a powerful word processor that it is rather a shame it
  turns out not to be one.

  In what follows I therefore sometimes compare Nisus's behaviour
  with that of Microsoft Word. This is not meant to imply that I
  like Word as a whole. But Word is Nisus's most obvious competitor,
  and many of Nisus's behaviours feel like deliberate improvements
  upon Word's way of doing things. Besides, a common question
  floating around the nets just now concerns upgrading to Word 5.0
  or switching to Nisus. So this review aims at helping you form
  your own answer: in brief, it probably depends on what you do. If
  you're interested in output of long complex documents with tables
  and other such features, stick with Word. If you want perhaps the
  most powerful program in existence for text creation and
  manipulation, go for Nisus.

  We begin with the middle level, the word-processing milieu.


Typing, Clicking, and Moving
----------------------------
  One senses Nisus's originality from the moment of starting to
  type. The blinking insertion point vanishes and does not reappear;
  lines of text after it do not move out of the way as you type, but
  are temporarily ignored. The program is busy following your
  typing; only when you pause is the screen updated. You may like
  this, or it may drive you mad; it is wonderful when you're typing,
  but if you spot a mistake a character or two back and hit Delete
  right after some typing, it may take a frustratingly long time (on
  a 68020 or 68000 machine) for Nisus to leave typing mode and
  respond to your Delete keypress. It's nice that even if Nisus
  doesn't update the screen smoothly, it doesn't forget what you're
  typing and doesn't force you to wait up, something often noticed
  with other programs on slower Macs.

  Double-clicking selects a word, as one expects; but triple-
  clicking selects a sentence, quadruple-clicking selects a
  paragraph, and quintuple-clicking (not as daunting as it may
  sound) selects the whole document! Option-dragging enables
  rectangular selection, as in Word, which can be handy for
  selecting and manipulating columns of text. Selection has an
  excellent intuitive "feel," and operates much more conveniently
  than in Word. For example, in Nisus, shift-triple-clicking after
  the insertion point selects from the insertion point to the end of
  the sentence; in Word, you have to use a hard-to-remember keypad
  command. In Word, double-clicking to select a word and then shift-
  clicking elsewhere extends the selection to include the whole word
  where you shift-click; in Nisus, it extends the selection only to
  the letter where you click, and will embrace the whole word only
  if you shift-double-click instead (though double-click-dragging
  will extend the selection a word at a time).

  Moreover, Nisus features non-contiguous selection (hold down
  option-command to select without deselecting any previous
  selections). Adam feels this should be standard in absolutely all
  word processors, because it is inherently Mac-like: you select a
  number of like objects and perform a single action on all of them,
  just as you do in the Finder. You can, for example, select all and
  only the scattered bits of text you want to italicise and then
  italicise them all at once with a single menu choice; or select a
  number of lines, cut or copy them, and paste them back in later to
  create a quick list. This feature is also basic to many macros
  (more on this later).

  You can move around the document (or extend a selection) by
  keyboard combination shortcuts. I find these difficult to
  remember, and long for something like Word's simple key-pad
  shortcuts. Adam disagrees; he finds Nisus's choice of option-
  arrows and command-arrows no more difficult or arbitrary than
  Word's use of the keypad, and excoriates Word for this mapping of
  the keypad to navigational movements (keypads do not exist on
  certain Macintosh models, and the use of the NumLock key can be
  tough on a beginner). My point, though, is that the keyboard
  combinations for these commands cannot be directly user-modified
  in Nisus, whereas in Word they can be.

  Moreover, although key combinations allow you to move by
  character, word, line, or paragraph, there is no quick way to move
  to the start or end of a line, and no way to move by sentence
  (even though the triple-clicking mentioned above clearly shows
  that Nisus knows what a sentence is). Further, although hitting
  Enter brings the insertion point into view (handy after scrolling
  to examine a different region), there is no way to return the
  insertion point itself to where it just was earlier, so that if
  you accidentally rocket yourself to the wrong place, you have to
  find your way back manually (whereas in Word, hitting keypad-0
  would get you back instantly). The same problem arises in another
  form after pasting a large amount of text. After the paste, the
  insertion point is located at the end of the inserted material.
  But what if you need to be at the beginning? In Word, keypad-0
  gets you there; in Nisus, you'll have to hunt for the spot
  manually. Of course you have to decide for yourself if this is the
  sort of feature that actually makes a difference to you (for Adam
  it doesn't).

  On the other hand, Nisus does provide you with the capacity to
  give places in your text names of your own choosing via the Mark
  Text command, and then later on to jump to any named place with
  the Jump To command. This can be a very handy way to navigate. Of
  itself, it involves enough menu- and dialog-selection that it
  isn't the sort of thing one would want to do before every paste;
  but (and this is characteristic of Nisus) you can combine this
  feature with the ability to modify the menu command keys
  (discussed below) and to write macros (ditto), in such a way as to
  work around the difficulty with pasting, in essence writing your
  own command whereby a command key-combination of your choice would
  mark your current location and then paste, all in one go, and
  another command key-combination would then jump you to the
  beginning of the paste. <more>

  Similarly, there's no reason you couldn't write a macro
  (accessible by a command key-combination of your own choice) to
  jump to the beginning of a line, or to the end of the next
  sentence (in fact, a macro that jumps you to the end of the next
  sentence is included with Nisus).

  And this raises a curious philosophical problem: where, in a
  program's milieu, should such tools as Jump To End of Sentence
  properly dwell? If you're hooked on Microsoft Word, or you think
  (like Microsoft) that the purpose of word processing on the Mac is
  to let the user play video games with text, then it should be part
  of the word processor's interface, a textual analogue to some
  nearly mindless physical screen- or keyboard-action. But if you
  think that users have some intelligence, and that the purpose of a
  computer is to be programmed and made to do its individual user's
  bidding, then you don't mind building the machine that will
  accomplish the tasks you have in mind; you don't care if the
  capacity to jump to the end of the sentence has to be constructed
  at the bottom level, the level of nuts-and-bolts programming. And
  this is what Nisus permits you to do.

  My own prejudices make me sympathetic to Nisus's approach. My
  first home computer was an Apple ][c, and I learned to program it
  top to bottom in Assembler; and I held tenaciously to it for
  years, refusing to switch to a Mac because, in my view, Mac
  programs were not, in general, as powerful as Apple programs were
  in this sense: they imposed their own limitations on the user,
  rather than empowering the user to accomplish her own goals, the
  way the great Apple programs did. To the extent that Nisus does
  thus empower the user, I think it is the greatest word processor
  in its price class; but when it doesn't, I feel more unhappy with
  it than I would with Word, because Word makes no pretence of
  empowering the user in the first place.


Windows
-------
  The text window can be scrolled vertically or horizontally. Icons
  at lower left and upper right of the window allow you to: split it
  horizontally or vertically (or both at once, giving four panes and
  four sets of scroll bars); show or hide a horizontal and/or a
  vertical ruler (a unique and occasionally invaluable feature);
  toggle between text and graphics mode; or show or hide a row of
  page, line, character, and memory information. A terrifically
  helpful little feature is that the display of what page you are on
  refers to what page is showing, not what page contains the
  insertion point, and it updates as you move the scroll thumb,
  before you even let it go - a valuable help for navigation.

  You can open numerous documents at once; you can even open
  multiple copies of one document, though only one can be written
  to. Then Nisus is ready to manipulate your windows for you. With
  just a click, all windows can be tiled or stacked; menu choices
  allow you to choose any window, send back the front window, or
  toggle the front two. With click-combinations, you can close back
  windows from the front window, select or scroll in a back window
  without making it active, make two windows scroll in synchrony,
  and more. Nisus is also smart about multiple screens, so if you
  zoom a window on an SE/30's small screen, it zooms to that size,
  whereas if you zoom a window on a second 13" color screen, you get
  a much larger window (most programs zoom only to the main monitor,
  extremely frustrating when you have two screens).

  An icon at the upper right also lets you open a page-layout view
  window - a window which can be left open while you work elsewhere.
  This reflects Nisus's larger philosophy of window management, a
  sort of "anything can be a window" approach. A scrolling list,
  called the Catalog, provides a private version of the Standard
  File Open dialog; but it's a window. Macros are loaded through
  macro files; the currently open macro file is a window. The
  Find/Replace dialog, the Spell Checking dialog, the current
  Glossary, are all windows. The Clipboard is a window - an editable
  window, and there are ten of them! Any or all of these windows can
  be left open for easy access and manipulation.

  But then why wasn't this splendid windows philosophy carried on to
  footnotes? When you create or edit a footnote, a new window does
  not open; rather, the current text window changes into a footnote
  window. There is thus no way whatever to edit a footnote and see
  the main text at the same time! But since the whole purpose of a
  footnote is to comment on the main text, to be able to see both
  simultaneously while working on the footnote would seem to be
  essential. Adam points out that there may be historical reasons
  for this: the first release of Nisus had no footnote capabilities
  at all, because Paragon said they were working on footnotes, but
  wanted to avoid the vaporware label that crippled the eventual
  release of FullWrite. Version 2.0 came out shortly thereafter with
  the footnotes included, but the rush may have precluded the use of
  a separate Footnote window. Still, I find Nisus's method of
  windowing footnotes rather inconsiderate of how people actually
  _use_ footnotes when they work; and even Adam, who doesn't use
  footnotes, agrees that he would like to see Paragon come up with a
  more flexible way of displaying the footnotes, perhaps using a
  separate window or by splitting the screen.

  Here's another irritation. It's neat to be able to tile windows
  (Adam says he once tiled 54 windows, approximately one megabyte of
  TidBITS text, on a 13" screen). But if you tile, say, just the top
  two windows (probably the most common situation, and one available
  with a single click), they are tiled side by side: that is, you
  see two thin vertical columns consisting of only the left bit of
  several texts. What's the sense of that? You cannot read any of
  the texts, because you can't see the entire line of any of them.
  What is not provided is any fast way of tiling above-and-below, so
  that you might see several full lines of one window and several
  full lines of another (though of course you can manually resize
  and adjust the windows to this position).


Menus
-----
  Menus, too, show the originality of Nisus's philosophy. A number
  of menus are hierarchical. You can make the Macros menu and the
  Windows menu pop down directly from the title bar of a window with
  a click while holding down the option or command key, so you don't
  have to go to the trouble of finding your way in from the menubar.
  A click while holding down shift and option will drop the Macro
  menu from a window title bar but instead of executing the menu
  selection, you will be put into the current macro file with your
  cursor ready to edit the selected macro, a very useful shortcut
  for those of us with numerous macros. And finally, an option-click
  on the menu bar of the clipboard window allows you to select which
  of the ten clipboards to display.

  You are free to assign command-key combinations to any item in any
  menu. These command-key combinations may involve a function-key, a
  keypad key plus command, or a normal key plus command; and, in
  addition, any or all of shift, option, and control. Furthermore,
  you may make a command-key combination up to three characters in
  length! Note that this is _not_ like the terrible WordStar
  commands, like Control-K-Q to save a file; since Paragon merely
  provides the facility and does not force it upon you (any idea
  what Command-F15 does in Word?), it turns out to be one of the
  most useful features in Nisus. This is because you can assign a
  shortcut for infrequently used commands and still remember them
  easily. The Save As command is a good example. If you wanted to
  assign a keyboard shortcut in Word or even QuicKeys, you'd
  probably have to settle for something like Command-Shift-Option-S,
  because you want to be able to remember the shortcut as being the
  shortcut for Save. But then what do you use for Spell Check? In
  Nisus, though, you can just assign Command-S-A to Save As (hold
  down command, hit S-A in quick succession) and never worry about
  forgetting because you've used a built-in mnemonic. Adam adds that
  utilities like QuicKeys would do well to emulate Nisus in this
  regard since it's getting harder and harder for him to think of
  meaningful key combinations for his QuicKeys macros as the number
  of them continues to increase.

  When I say that you can assign a key combination to any menu item,
  I really mean it. If the menu item is one that changes or in some
  other way comes and goes - for example, a particular font that may
  or may not be loaded - Nisus allows you to assign it a key
  combination that is completely name-dependent; if the item is
  present, the key combination applies to it. Or, you can make your
  key-combination position-dependent instead; it always designates,
  say, the first font, regardless of what it is.

  What's more, the menu items available in menus can change, not
  only according to what mode you are in, but according to what
  modifier-keys you hold down. In the Edit menu, the Copy command
  appears in the usual place; but if you press shift it changes to
  Append Copy, and if you press option it changes to Clear
  Clipboards. This works even if you have already selected the menu;
  you can press different modifiers or combinations of modifiers and
  watch some of the menu items change right before your eyes. (In
  certain cases, though, such as a User-Defined Style, option-
  selecting opens an item for editing rather than applying it, and
  this fact is _not_ registered by any change on the menu.)

  The editing tools offered in these menus also reflect of Nisus's
  originality. Not only can you Cut or Copy, you can Append Cut or
  Append Copy, gathering additional material into the clipboard
  without wiping out what is already there - and remember, you have
  10 clipboards to work with, and can look at any one of them
  (though not several at once, alas). You can Paste; you can also
  Swap Paste, swapping what's in the clipboard with what's selected
  in the document. You are given virtually infinite Undo and Redo
  power: all changes to your document are remembered (up to a number
  that you set, based on how much memory you want to devote to this)
  and you can move backwards through the list, undoing them all one
  by one. Just about everything can be undone, so one has very
  little fear of making alterations to a document. Saving the
  document does not affect the Undo level, so there's no need to
  fear accidentally selecting all and replacing your document with a
  single character the instant before an autosave utility kicks in
  and saves the single character; in other word processors your
  document would be toast. Not so in Nisus. What's more, a very cute
  recovery feature is that if you Copy when no text is selected, the
  text that you last deleted - even if you deleted it with the
  Delete key or by over-typing it - will be moved onto the
  clipboard, whence it can be Pasted!

  The only capacity I miss is that you cannot Paste as Text Only,
  stripping what is pasted of all character formatting and making it
  conform to its surroundings. (It turns out that it is possible to
  write a macro to permit this; the method, attributable to Jon
  Matousek of Paragon, is so unlikely that I cannot believe it was
  ever discovered.) Also, I actually have a complaint about Undo:
  when you Undo, the insertion point is not restored to where it
  was, so that you can undo the effect of some dumb thing you did,
  but you may well lose your place in the document. Surely it would
  not have been that hard to add the location of the insertion point
  to the list of things Nisus is memorizing each time it adds to the
  Undo list. [Adam: Picky about those insertion points, isn't he? Am
  I strange or do very few people actually ever notice where the
  insertion point ends up after some action?]

  Another place where a valuable suite of menu items appears is
  under Style. This refers in the first instance to character
  styling, and you get a lot of options here. In addition to the
  usual Bold, Italic, Underline, you get two levels of super- and
  subscripting, three kinds of underlining, strike-through, overbar,
  boxed (apparently useful for creating a blank box with an option-
  space that can then be filled in with an X later on), inverted
  (white on black), and eight colors. The colors are not trivial
  additions, even if your monitor is black-and-white. You can use
  them to help in the writing of powerful macros, as a way of
  marking text temporarily. Further, making text White, the
  background color, renders it invisible without stopping it from
  taking up room; this is valuable if you want to make an indent
  match exactly the width of some text above without resorting to
  the ruler.

  I do sometimes wonder about the menu status of certain items. For
  example, if I want to type a forced return or a soft return, I
  have to hit characters from the keyboard, which I must remember;
  they are not menu items, and they cannot be made menu items. But
  if I want to type a forced page break, I go up into the menu. Why
  don't these actions, which seem to me perfectly parallel, have the
  same status? Why should one be available from the menu, while the
  others require that I remember a keyboard code? However, Adam
  replies that lots of reviews have criticized Nisus for having _too
  many_ menus, so there's no reason to put commands like soft return
  into a menu when almost no one ever uses them and most people
  wouldn't even be sure why they would want to, whereas forced page
  breaks are extremely common and should be put out front. In fact,
  Adam goes on, the basic problem Paragon faces is that Nisus has so
  many features that it's hard to decide where to put them. In some
  ways Nisus's interface is quirky, but they do some things that
  make perfect sense. For instance, Font, Size, and Style are all
  right in the menubar since those are some of the most commonly
  used menus in any word processor. In any case neither I nor Adam
  agree with those who criticise Nisus for its heavy use of
  hierarchical menus.


..

 This text is wrapped as a setext. For more information send email
 with the single word "setext" (no quotes) in the Subject: line to
 <[e-mail]>. A file will be returned promptly.