Inform 6 extension for the Zed editor is now live

[Or4c (Sam Win-Mason)]

Hey there. Just a heads up to say the Inform 6 language extension I wrote for Zed is now available to download in the editor. Enjoy.

[inventor200 (Joey (Jess) Tanden)]

Hey, @Zed, do you have an entire custom I6 dev environment…??

(Genuine question. Sorry, I don’t wander through this side of the forum often so idk what happens in the I6 scene)

[Or4c (Sam Win-Mason)]

At this stage it’s just syntax highlighting and outline support.

[fredrik (Fredrik Ramsberg)]

For anyone who is as confused as I am, it seems Zed is an editor for MacOS, Linus and soon also Windows: https://zed.dev/

[Zed (Zed Lopez)]

No relation.

[heasm66 (Henrik Åsman)]

Any screenshots available?

[heasm66 (Henrik Åsman)]

Just when I wondered if I would make a language extension for Zil I came across this article…

A case against case highlighting by Linus Åkesson (@lft)

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

I fundamentally disagree, honestly. I often find myself skimming code to find something, and knowing immediately whether something is code, comment, or string is extremely important for that. Needing to scroll back a dozen lines to see if there’s a start-of-comment marker there is not a good use of my time. Linus’s response (in the article) is that I should simply not have code be in comments, but when I’m modifying a complex algorithm, being able to comment something out and return to it later when bugs come up is extremely valuable.

The core of the argument is that reading code shouldn’t be made easy, because it makes people stop paying attention. But this same argument could equally well be applied to conveniences that the author (presumably) likes, as the ones he doesn’t—how about indentation, newlines, and whitespace, for example? Or being able to give names to variables and functions instead of using raw memory addresses? Those also serve no purpose except to make the code easier to read, but I don’t think most people are in favor of giving them up.

[Mike_G (Mike)]

Code highlighting is an absolute must have feature.

One of the basic rules of thumb in typography is that, when writing a piece of text, you should choose one typeface and stick to it. Likewise, a splash of colour may grab the reader’s attention, but it will inevitably decrease the legibility of the text. The natural flow of the text is broken, and it takes more brain effort to piece together the individual letters into words and semantics. Cognitively, the reading process becomes slightly less automatic and slightly more conscious; leaving less room in the conscious part of the mind for actually understanding the text.

Arghh, reading natural language is nothing at all like reading code (apologies to Inform). Natural language just doesn’t have the technical specificity requirements code does. Trying to find a misplaced quotation mark on a string full of escaped characters in a big block of code without visual aid is extremely painful, as are any number of tiny inconspicuous errors that can make your day miserable.

[heasm66 (Henrik Åsman)]

He got a lot of pushback in the comments. I almost think he trolled a bit.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

There are also many, many times I’ve found a misplaced quotation mark in a published book, simply because that’s an error that’s easy to overlook in text. It doesn’t cause much of a problem for comprehension, so it doesn’t get noticed.

In code, on the other hand…