inf7’s goals are to:
- make it easy to create and compile projects on the command-line
- make usable Project Indices available to CLI users (including links to documentation)
The documentation-handling it has to do for the latter offers a couple of benefits of potential interest beyond just to command-line users. It generates one big web page of all of Writing in Inform and The Recipe Book, facilitating searching the whole of the documentation. And it can create an epub of the whole thing that’s almost 2/3 smaller than the epub included with the IDE packages’ documentation.
Full documentation and the code is available at the inf7 github repo.
Once you’ve set it up, e.g., with
$ inf7 setup --internal /usr/local/share/inform7/Internal --external ~/external --resources /usr/share/gnome-inform7/Resources --docs /usr/share/gnome-inform7/Documentation --author "Zed Lopez"
creating and compiling a project would look like:
$ cd ~/inform
$ inf7 init "A Walk in the Park"
Created /home/zed/inform/A Walk in the Park.inform
$ emacs A\ Walk\ in\ the\ Park.inform/Source/story.ni
$ inf7 compile A\ Walk\ in\ the\ Park
/usr/local/bin/ni --noprogress --internal /usr/local/share/inform7/Internal --external /home/zed/external --project /home/zed/inform/A Walk in the Park.inform
Compiled 23-word source.
/usr/local/bin/inform6 -wE2SDG /home/zed/inform/A Walk in the Park.inform/Build/auto.inf /home/zed/inform/A Walk in the Park.inform/Build/output.ulx
Inform 6.34 for Linux (21st May 2020)
In: 1 source code files 66296 syntactic lines
Out: Glulx story file 1.210503 (537.5K long):
/usr/local/bin/cBlorb -unix /home/zed/inform/A Walk in the Park.inform/Release.blurb /home/zed/inform/A Walk in the Park.inform/Build/output.gblorb
cBlorb 1.2 [executing on Monday 3 May 2021 at 13:44.58]
Completed: wrote blorb file of size 642210 bytes (1 picture(s), 0 sound(s))
and the project’s Index would be viewable with, e.g.,
$ firefox "A Walk in the Park.inform/index.html"
This is barely-tested alpha code that I haven’t yet used to develop a real Inform 7 project. I don’t know of any bugs, but I’m sure they’re there.