how does IF affect your writing in other fields?

Specifically, does anyone else find themselves highlighting text in things you’re writing and hitting command-slash to try to comment it out?

I’ve never tried that specific thing, no, but when I’ve been writing or playing a lot of IF, I do have to remind myself very sternly that I shouldn’t write regular fiction in second person and/or present tense unless I have a damn good reason. (I never do.)

Does commenting out I6 template code with square brackets count?

What is command-slash? (Since I don’t understand your question, I think the answer is “no” in my case. :wink: )

It’s the keyboard short cut for commenting out highlighted text in Mac. The windows equivalent is ALT + slash.

When I’ve been dabbling more heavily in IF, I tend to think more in terms of objects (sometimes to the point where I have to shake that tendency out of my head to proceed). In terms of how events might advance, how NPCs might be influenced, etc.

Occasionally I’ll type two quotation marks in short succession and then type the quote itself between them. It’s a habit I picked up from writing in Inform, since it looks a little cleaner in the pane this way.

It’s affected my reading: I’m now ultra-sensitive to any mention of cardinal directions in static fiction.

Well, I’m insanely grateful to learn of the shortcut matt has given us. But otherwise, no, they don’t affect each other at all. I think I wrote my first adventure game with a cheapie parser between ages 8 and 10. Later there was a big chunk in the middle of my life where I didn’t write any IF. But having known writing-writing and adventure-game writing from that young age, they’ve never interefered with each other in my brain.

  • Wade

It may just be an idiosyncrasy of mine that I like to comment passages out with brackets when I’m writing drafts of philosophy papers. (That way I can search for square brackets before I send the paper off, to make sure I haven’t left in anything I don’t want to.) Just before I made this post I found myself highlighting a passage I wanted to put in brackets and then thinking, “And what are you are going to do now, smart guy?”

There are a couple of things that I’m writing that drift back and forth between being written up as IF or read-only fiction, but that’s partly because I spend a lot of time pondering characters before I start typing. In related news, I haven’t been finishing that much writing.

I often find myself hitting command-slash when editing extensions in the Mac IDE. It doesn’t work. :angry:
More frequently, I find myself entering vi commands in other editors, like Inform or web forms. I use :w sometimes, and occasionally /searchstring or hjkl or CTRL-F.

When I first learned that vi and nethack both had the same navigation keys, I started playing nethack to improve my vi proficiency.

I find myself more willing to look for extensions or add-ons in other languages. For some reason, seeing “Helpy Code by Person X” makes an extension feel more personal to me than just “Dude, stdio.h, stdlib.h, graphics/string parsing package, everyone knows about them” or “Dude, don’t recreate the wheel.”

This probably isn’t just Inform helping me, but really, having so many names attached to stuff that’s helped me is the best reminder that, yes, there are people behind the machines and the lower-level coding I don’t need to worry about. I mean, I know this, but having a somewhat emotional angle on it all helps a lot.