Hacked version of 6L38 for MacOS

I have put together a monstrous hybrid of the 6L02 Mac IDE with the 6L38 Inform core. (It also includes the 6L38 templates and built-in extensions.)

eblong.com/zarf/tmp/Inform-6L02+38.app.zip

This comes with no guarantees. Obviously it has all the Mac IDE bugs that were reported for 6L02. It also has the 6L02 built-in documentation, so that may fail to match up.

However, you can open projects, create new projects, and install extensions, so it may help people get work done.

Was there something wrong with 6L38 for Mac?

“6L38 cannot open or create new projects” – inform7.com/mantis/view.php?id=1405

(The “open recent project” link works, but “Open…” and “Create New Project…” do not. I think installing extensions also fails.)

I see!

I dropped your hack into my Applications folder and renamed it Inform… but now no extensions show up in the Open Extension-> submenu of the File menu!

Yeah, I don’t know what’s up there.

I recommend giving all your Inform apps distinct names, by the way. I’ve got half-a-dozen lying around at this point.

I haven’t known how to set app associations since the days of ResEdit… what happens if I type “open kerkerkruip.inform” - can I control which app runs it?

I don’t know about doing stuff from the terminal window, but if you’re in the graphical Finder you can select a file and hit command-I to open up the file’s info. A few down there’s a pop-up menu for “Open with…”; every Inform application you have should be on that menu and you can change it. You can even do “Change all” to change the app association for every file with that extension, I think, though in this case you probably don’t want to.

(This is in OS X 10.7.5, I guess. I hope they haven’t changed it.)

That’s still how it works. Or you can type “open kerkerkruip.inform -a Inform-6L02+38.app”.

Okay, this seems to work:

Launch 6L02+38

Install Extension… Questions (after removing extra space from the title line)

Quit and launch 6L38

Open Recent → Questions.i7x

Window shows a warning that the extension isn’t installed. Click “install.”

Now Michael Callaghan shows up in the Extensions-> submenu, and the test compiles.

Hmmm… some coincidence is involved there. The same method failed to cause Numbered Disambiguation Choices to appear in Recent Items.

Has the location of the Extensions folder changed? The one being used here appears to have quite a convoluted path:

~/Library/Containers/com.inform7.inform-compiler/Data/Library/Inform/Extensions/Michael\ Callaghan

Also, that is not the location of the built-in extensions.

Aaah… good news finally. This works:

open -a Inform ~/Library/Inform/Extensions/Aaron\ Reed/Numbered\ Disambiguation\ Choices.i7

…but it works in a weird way! Just dropping files into the 6L38 Extensions directory doesn’t work. But they can be opened from there. When you click “install” it asks, “Version 1/140209 is already installed. Do you want to overwrite this extension?”

…actually, that doesn’t work. It says it was unable to replace the file. And it deletes the file!

Yes. In 6L02 it’s ~/Library/Inform/Extensions. In 6L38 it’s the longer ~/Library/Containers/com.inform7.inform-compiler/… path that you quote. I expect this has something to do with the sandbox process.

My Inform-6L02+38 uses the 6L02 IDE, so everything should be managed in the old spot. The new ni binary is invoked and given the old extension path.

This should no longer be necessary. Go get the fixed 6L38: https://intfiction.org/t/fix-for-inform-7-for-mac-os-x-creation-problem/7404/1