dialog-mode.el -- a dialog major mode for emacs

tzbits · January 15, 2026, 7:23pm

I took a look at the previously posted Emacs major mode for Dialog but it didn’t really do what I wanted so I wrote my own and made it available here if anyone wants to give it a try:

github.com/tzbits/learn-dialog

dialog-mode.el

main

;;; dialog-mode.el --- Major mode for editing Dialog files  -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-

;; Copyright (C) 2026  tzbits.com

;; Author: tzbits
;; Keywords: languages, interactive fiction
;; URL: https://github.com/tzbits/learn-dialog/blob/main/dialog-mode.el
;; Package-Requires: ((emacs "29.3"))
;; Version: 0.1.0

;;; Commentary:

;; This package provides a major mode for the Dialog interactive fiction
;; programming language. It includes syntax highlighting, indentation,
;; and paragraph navigation.
;;
;; Installation:
;;
;; To install manually, place dialog-mode.el in your load-path and add
;; the following to your init file:

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sue · January 19, 2026, 4:02pm

This is great! Thanks!

tzbits · January 20, 2026, 2:07pm

Glad you found it useful You might want to grab the latest version–I added syntax highlighting for built-ins and I fixed some bugs with M-q dialog-fill-paragraph and C-c C-f dialog-format-buffer.

Please let me know if you run into any bugs.

sue · January 22, 2026, 11:24pm

“Latest” as in later than the 19th? I’m definitely running into indent-buffer doing completely the wrong thing.

tzbits · January 26, 2026, 4:37pm

Yes, I started re-working dialog-fill-paragraph and dialog-format-buffer on the 20th and finished up on the 21st. You can grab the latest version here.

I tested dialog-format-buffer on the standard library and some other games and I’ve tried to make it so that it’s not too agressive. It should mainly just align single-line rules on a tab-stop and wrap text to an 80 chars line width.

One format difference w/ the standard library is that I don’t use tabs between the rule head and the body for single line rules. I’m in the camp that says tabs are only for indenting and spaces should be used for alignment (it makes everything line up independent of tab size)