I can’t say it was love at first sight. The Nisus screen is cluttered with all sorts of unfamiliar icons. But with the grudging help of the sometimes confusing documentation, I sorted everything out; Nisus really did give me a rough approximation of Everything. With a click of the mouse on the icon bar, you can switch to a drawing mode or an interactive page preview. You have constant information on where you are in the document, and easy formatting capabilities. And the program moves briskly, not something taken for granted in a space-gobbler like Nisus. It works fine on an SE or a Plus.
To get to know Nisus really well, you need more than a joyride. You have to be willing to go places you haven’t gone with many word processors. Case in point is the search function. In many programs, it’s a question of finding a word and maybe replacing it with another. But ask Nisus about this, and you discover that searching is a kind of religion. If you spend enough lime with Nisus lo develop a relationship, you find that it can conduct penetrating searches through multiple documents, either making simple seek-and-gather operations, or incredibly complicated ones through a protocol named GREP. This unwieldy moniker bespeaks Nisus’s unsavory past, rooted in the realm of wirehead-dominated UNIX.
Generally, Nisus has made the transition from user-contemptuous UNIX to user-embracing Macintosh quite neatly: sort of an Eliza Doolittle iransfomiation. The seams show only when Nisus does certain remarkable tricks, and even then the program is more charming than offensive. I’m thinking of its macros. Nisus has them in abundance; besides the usual ability to make your own, it comes packaged with an assortment of about 50, ranging from the useful Character Swap to Zip Code sorters. Like Scheherazade weaving a tale each night, Nisus offers a macro for every need. Choose something called BeginParagraph36 and you find that after every carriage return, the next letter is a big drop cap. Only after much contemplation did I realize that the first letter of each paragraph is changed to a size of 36 points. Ah, the inscrutable wisdom of Nisus.
More important, Nisus feels right. Its huge powers — table of contents, indexing, cross-referencing, flexible menu keys — don’t get in the way of the writing. And its drawing capabilities are both simple and powerful. Never has it been so easy to draw an arrow from one key phrase to another. And talk about forgiving — Nisus has an unlimited number of undo commands, so you can retrace your steps and fix whatever error you might have committed. Besides all this, every' so often Nisus does something that makes me weak with pleasure; with a simple keystroke, for instance, you gel a detailed reading of your document, akin to a baseball box score, with word and sentence count, creation date, and even a Flesch Reading Ease score. The more I used Nisus, the more I cared about it.
Levy, Steven. (September 1989). Romancing the Word Processor. Macworld. (pgs. 61-62).
Paragon Concepts, Inc.
Applications
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Nisus.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
