Five Days with Inform 7: a retrospective review

[tvil (Tobias V. I. Langhoff)]

@lpsmith

Those source code files I would create and edit in Visual Studio Code, using the “Inform 7” extension by ‘Natrium729’. In another window, I’d have the I7 Windows IDE open, and that’s where I’d edit the (minimal) story.ni file. While coding and recompiling, I would edit in VSC, switch to I7, click in story.ni, hit ‘space’ and then ‘delete’ somewhere to let it know things had changed, then hit ‘replay’.

I also code in an external editor (Neovim for me), and I just use Inform’s command line interface to compile instead of the Inform IDE. VS Code has a plugin that can compile the project for you (I haven’t used it, I just made a shell script). Of course, if you like to test the game in the IDE with the Index and everything (I’ve so far had Vorple as a target so I want to test in a browser anyway), this is less useful, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.

Command-line Inform 7: how to use ni, inform6, and cBlorb by CLI for 9.3/6M62

[ Note: for Inform 7 10.1 and above, see this summary of Inform 10.1 command-line usage or the official Inform 7 v10 command-line usage docs. Once you’ve compiled Inform 7 source to Inform 6, the information below continues to have some relevance for compiling from I6 to glulx or z-code. 10.1 doesn’t use cBlorb. I7-helpers offer some crude scripts for compilation. ] If you’ve ever found yourself going through the cheesy Perl interface’s source again for how to compile Inform on the command-line…

@lpsmith

This was definitely exacerbated by not having enough time to look everything up, but also was a problem in the first place because it’s not nearly as easy to stumble on compiles-but-wrong syntax in traditional programming languages, meaning I’ve grown to rely on ‘check if it compiles’ as a syntax checker.

What you’re talking about isn’t syntax, though, it’s semantics! Those problems exist in traditional languages too (like falling through a switch/case in C because you forgot to break, or mixing up = and ==), but usually modern compilers are nice enough to warn you about it.