I was reminded of this post from former Nisus developer Martin Wierschin:
How does does an emoji do that in text? By using a zero-width joiner character between its constituent characters. That way software knows to display all the codes together as a single glyph or image on screen. This joiner trick is used for a variety of purposes like skin tone and gender modifiers.
Now to the part where we explain how the zero-width joiner character can help your writing. In certain situations you might consider inserting a joiner character to change where line wrapping occurs. The joiner acts as a signal to the text layout engine that the adjacent characters should be joined. You can think of the joiner like a glob of glue that keeps its neighbors together. The characters won’t display a single image as with emoji, but rather they will be kept together on the same line.
Nisus Writer Pro has a built-in menu command to insert the zero-width joiner. There’s also a built-in way to insert it into any macOS text view, but it’s not obvious:
- Open the Emoji & Symbols inspector.
- If necessary, click the rightmost button to switch it to the full Character Viewer.
- From the … menu, choose Customize List….
- At the bottom of the list, check the box next to Code Tables ‣ Unicode and click Done.
- Select Unicode at the left and then select 2000 General Punctuation at the right.
- Zero Width Joiner (U+200D) and related characters are in the first row.
You can add them as favorites. Unfortunately, even then, they do not seem to be searchable by name. For me, the easiest way to make unusual characters accessible is to add them as LaunchBar snippets. macOS text replacements would probably work, too.
Here are the characters from Wierschin’s “female chef” example if you want to copy/paste them to try it out:
👩 + U+200D + 🍳 = 👩🍳
Previously:
Update (2025-10-28): Thanks to Ralf for helping me to realize that searching for “joiner” does find the character. It looks like it only finds the letters “j,” “o,” “i,” “n,” “e,” and “r,” but there are actually invisible characters after that that only show up if you click on what looks like empty space.
Emoji LaunchBar Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Nisus Writer Pro Unicode
Joe Kissell:
For more than a year, we’ve heard scattered complaints: problems with Nisus Software’s website, particularly the user discussion forum; slow or absent responses to support requests; assorted bugs; and other issues. But earlier this week, on 22 October 2025, the reports changed to: “Did you know the Nisus website is completely down, and that Nisus Writer is no longer in the Mac App Store? Does this mean they’re out of business?”
On the one hand: The site is back online as I write this. The app still works. I’m writing the first draft of this article in Nisus Writer Pro on a Mac running macOS 26 Tahoe, and it’s fine. You can still download it and buy a license. At least one person is actively involved in the company, to some extent. It’s (mostly) alive!
On the other hand: All available evidence suggests that development and support for Nisus Writer have ceased, and barring some new information, its future is doubtful. It’s (mostly) dead!
[…]
Martin Wierschin, Dave Larson, and Mark Hurvitz (each of whom was the public face of Nisus Software at one point) are no longer at the company. Jolanta is in her late 80s, and Jerzy is older than Jolanta. As best I can determine, Jerzy is not actively involved with the business anymore, and Jolanta’s involvement appears to be minimal. I don’t think there are any other employees left at Nisus Software.
The latest update to the app was on 12 November 2024, and it appears the last time a Nisus employee posted on their discussion forum was also in November 2024.
It’s an odd situation, with no public activity in nearly a year and the apps removed from the Mac App Store but still available for purchase from the Web site.
And a sad one. Nisus Writer was the coolest demo I saw at my first Macworld Expo in 1992 or so, and it remained a great app through all of Apple’s transitions: PowerPC, Mac OS X, Cocoa, Intel, 64-bit, Apple Silicon, etc. But over time it became my favorite app that I no longer actually use. And I suspect that usage declined for others as well. iOS and Markdown brought a revival of apps that use plain text. And most people who need rich text don’t need the power of Nisus Writer. The more basic use cases got squeezed by Pages, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs, which are free and/or ubiquitous. But for those who need it, there’s no clear replacement:
True, there’s no shortage of other Mac word processors. I’m sure that for many people, any number of them would be perfectly adequate. However, if you’re the sort of person who needs the tools that only Nisus Writer provides, none of that matters. Although I can’t speak for anyone else, I can definitely speak for Take Control Books, and we would be unable to do what we need to do in any of those other apps. Users who have built up libraries of complex macros in Nisus Writer, or who require find-and-replace based on style-sensitive regular expressions (to take just two examples) would be seriously hampered by another app.
Here are some forum threads discussing the state of things:
Previously:
Update (2025-10-28): John Gordon:
We are in the dark ages of word processing — Pages is buggy and incomplete and Word for macOS is eye-bleach.
John Gruber:
Seems like an ignominious demise for a once-great app. Nisus Writer has been an acclaimed Mac-only (and Mac-assed) word processor since 1989. I never got into it, but I could always see the appeal.
As he says, one way to think of it was like a BBEdit for rich text. (The developers had previously built a plain text editor called QUED/M.) But while I prefer BBEdit, there are many plain text editors that can do regex processing, and there wasn’t really anything else like Nisus Writer.
Business Mac Mac App macOS Tahoe 26 Nisus Writer Pro Sunset Word Processing
Nikita Bier:
We’re testing a new link experience, starting on iOS -- to make it easier for your followers to engage with your post while browsing links.
For creators, a common complaint is that posts with links tend to get lower reach. This is because the web browser covers the post and people forget to Like or Reply. So X doesn’t get a clear signal whether the content is any good.
To help get better signal, posts will now collapse to the bottom of the page so people can react while you’re reading.
As always, remember: the post should stand alone as great content so write a solid caption.
This seems like a better design, anyway. But my understanding is that, separate from naturally lower engagement, Twitter is still artificially deboosting posts with links, leading to an unfortunate pattern where people post the link in a reply to the main tweet. He insists that this is not the case.
Rosyna Keller:
Note that this new “feature” makes articles load slower and allows Twitter to see more of your browsing habits because it’s no longer using SFSafariViewController. That means no more fraudulent website warnings and no more content/ad/tracker blockers.
Léo Natan:
Part of the blame is on Apple for making SFSVC such a rigid and badly constructed API, that supports zero customization.
Previously:
Cocoa Design iOS iOS 26 iOS App Strategy Tax Twitter Web
