The new (open source) Inform 7 v10.1.0 was released 2022-04-28: Inform 7 v10 docs. The beta Linux IDE supporting I7 v10 is out; IDEs for Mac OS and Windows are expected soon, but no date has been announced. v10 renders a lot of specifics on this page out of date; it will be updated as soon as is feasible after the IDEs’ release.
Official Documentation for 6M62
- Writing with Inform
- The Recipe Book
- General Index to Inform Documentation
- Writing with Inform/The Recipe Book epub
Those are included in the IDE (“integrated development environment”, a term for the kind of tool that the main Inform 7 application is.) You won’t find the epub in the app, but it’s among the files in the installation.
Tutorials
These are excellent – start here.
- Allison Parrish’s Inform 7 Concepts and Strategies (6M62)
- Carolyn VanEseltine’s Welcome to Adventure: A Quick-Start Guide to Inform (6L38)
Installation
Juhana Leinonen’s Borogove is a free web app to edit and run I7 online (any of v10, 6M62, or 6G60), perfect for experimentation without installing anything; Borogove’s snippets feature allows sharing code examples.
The official packages mentioned below are available at: I7 Downloads.
MacOS
Use the package on the I7 site; don’t try using the one from the App store (despite the assurance that “the current version of Inform is always available from the Mac App Store.”) There are known issues with slowness on machines with TouchBars and the cursor disappearing in Dark Mode. An unofficial MacOS IDE release addresses these. Both the official and unofficial versions allow compiling for 6L02 and 6L38 as well as 6M62. Testing examples in Extension Projects doesn’t work.
Windows
Use the package on the I7 site (said to work with any version of Windows from XP SP 3 on). Or there’s a current beta release of a new Windows version that allows compiling for 6L02 and 6L38 as well as 6M62. It’s 64-bit-only, and has been tested only on Windows 10, but may work with older versions. Be warned that there have been multiple reports of security/antivirus programs causing problems with it: Avast, AVG, Windows Defender.
Linux
The versions of Linux for which there's an official IDE package have long since ceased to be supported; it's GTK2-based and hard to build in a modern GTK3 env.Unofficial rpm/deb IDE packages
GTK 3 dev version
There is a new (as of 2022-03-16) beta release of the Inform 7 IDE for Gnome.
The official download page also offers a CLI-only version for Linux, which comes with “the cheesy Perl interface”. Or consult How to use ni, inform6, and cBlorb by CLI for info on using those commands directly. Some projects to help are Vimform7, the Inform 7 extension for VS code, Spaceformacs, and inf7.
Versions of ni prior to 6M62 are incompatible with Linux kernels >= 4.11 (from 2017). To build for 6L38 or older an old Linux in a VM or Windows Inform in WINE are the options (or for 6G60 use playfic.com online).
The official packages include components that have more recent versions. Some updates:
- Inform 6 6.36; Inform 6 6.36 for Windows; 6.37 is the current development version of Inform 6
- Glulx Entry Points and Glulx Text Effects by Emily Short
- the Quixe, Parchment, and Vorple templates
Versions
In general, references written regarding 6L02 or 6L38 remain relevant for 6M62.
Each release had at least minor changes to the language; version 6L02 had many backwards-incompatible changes: code written for 6G60 or earlier is unlikely to compile in 6L02 or later. This document usually notes the version as of which something was current. The Change Log has exhaustive details:
- The Change Log (comprehensive)
- Change Logs per release
- Change log in Mantis (the former bug tracker)
Updating Code written for 6G60
Licensing
How to Organize/Structure Your Project
There’s no one answer; here are multiple answers (see games with available source code for examples.)
- Splitting the story into multiple files
- I7 Code Organization and Efficiency
- Juhana Leinonen’s Structuring I7 Code
- Ryan Veeder’s How to Write the Way I Write in I7
IDE Accessibility
- Using the I7 Windows IDE with NVDA (a screenreader)
Status
Graham Nelson's talks on the future of Inform 7
Manuals/Books
The Inform 7 Handbook by Jim Aikin (6L38); the I7 Handbook in PDF/ODT; an at-cost print-on-demand Inform 7 Handbook is available.
Jason Boyd’s Inform 7 Introductory Guide (6M62)
Inform 7 for Programmers (PDF) by Ron Newcomb (6G60). Note that the web version of I7 for Programmers is older, for 5U92.
Aaron Reed’s book, Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7. It was for 6E72; Creating Interactive Fiction with I7’s errata provide updates for 6G60. Creating Interactive Fiction’s publisher lists the physical book as available to order and B&N sells an epub of Creating Interactive Fiction for the Nook. (There hasn’t been a legitimate PDF version; if you see someone offering such for sale, it’s… not legitimate.) Aaron plans to update Creating Interactive Fiction at some point.
John Timmons’ Inform Snippets and Inform Manual (PDF) (c. 5U92-6F95)
References
- Oliver Reiser’s I7 cheatsheet (6G60)
- Emily Short’s rules flowchart (PDF) (5U92)
- Mark Green’s Learn X in Y Minutes: Inform 7 (6M62) is a brief cheat sheet
- Nathanael Nerode’s Cookbook includes a useful reference to I7 line break behavior.
Compilation produces a Project Index browsable in the IDE which offers an enormous amount of detail about I7, including info you won’t find in the docs. It’s the closest thing to a reference manual.
The Project Index’s Phrasebook Index section (Phrases, Lexicon, Relations, Verbs) is good to check (along with the documentation’s General Index) when you half-remember something you’ve heard of and need to find the right term to look up.
The actual syntax the I7 compiler uses to parse I7 code can be found in Languages/English/Syntax.preform in your installation’s Internal directory. The Backus-Naur Form syntax provided isn’t accurate. See the Syntax.preform documentation PDF (6L02). Syntax.preform also lets you see what irregular verbs and plurals Inform 7 handles and how.
Extensions
See Where to find Inform 7 Extensions for the principal sources.
Counterfeit Monkey’s Extensions: beyond the many unique extensions, many other extensions included here are modified from their original versions.
Separate from the Authoring > Inform 7 category here, there is a Technical Development > Inform Extensions category chiefly discussing issues with existing published extensions
Glulx/Glk extensions ecosystem
Extension Writing Guides:
Standard Rules
I7 includes the Standard Rules with every game. They’re well-commented and the authority on the I7 World Model and I7’s defaults (they used to be labeled Appendix A of the documentation). They can be browsed in the IDE. (See “Contents” within any compiled game.)
Note the warning in Writing in Inform 27.14: things in the SR that look modifiable may not really be; they could be interdependent with something hard-coded in the compiler. And beware that all of the past three versions’ Standard Rules (6L02, 6L38, 6M62) are marked Version 3/120430, but each is different. (Likewise, 6E59 through 6G60’s Standard Rules are all marked Version 2/090402 but each is different.)
Games/examples with available Source Code
- Chin Kee Yong’s The Weight of a Soul (6M62)
- Victor Gijsbers’ Kerkerkruip (6M62)
- Alex Proudfoot’s ports of The I7 Standard Examples, including Emily Short’s Bronze (6M62)
- Daniel Stelzer’s Scroll Thief, Scroll Thief Bitbucket repo (6L38)
- Juhana Leinonen’s Sparkle (6L02)
- Jack Welch’s re: Dragon, a Vorple I7 game with a non-standard interface (6M62)
- Wade Clarke’s Ghosterington Night (6L38)
- Crowther and Woods’ Adventure (6M62)
- Ryan Veeder Expo for Good IF Event 1: Beautiful Source Code (6M62)
- IFDB search for I7 games with source code from 2016 on (6L38 and 6M62)
- Many Inform games’ source code on the IF archive. Not labeled with versions – some are old; some are recent.
- Cragne Manor by divers hands (6M62)
- Emily Short’s Counterfeit Monkey (6M62) Especially worth examining if you’re writing a large game or concerned with performance: it’s one of the larger I7 games and has been extensively optimized. Don’t deprive yourself of the pleasure of playing it without spoilers first, though.
Inform 6
I7 compiles to Inform 6 before that gets compiled to Glulx or z-code. The Inform 6 Standard Library isn’t involved; I7 uses the I6 Template Layer that every Inform installation has under Internal/I6T. These used to be labeled Appendix B of the documentation: their comments often document things that aren’t documented elsewhere.
There are places where the best or only way to do something is by interacting directly with the I6 layer (many extensions do so) and other places where I7 behaviors can be better understood by understanding how they’re an artifact of I6 representations or where reading your project’s auto.inf, the I6 code that I7 generated, is useful to investigate problems.
- Emily Short’s Translation of Inform 6 Entry Points into Inform 7 (4X60)
- Much more at The List of Inform 6 Documentation
Some Useful IntFiction Posts and Threads
- Scope and visibility and more on scope and visibility
- Spatial and other relations between objects and Spatial relations addendum
- The Hidden Secrets of Inform 7
- Command-line Inform 7: how to use ni, inform6, and cBlorb by CLI
- Checklist for authors of IF and Inform 7 IF in particular
- Performance Best Practices (there are a couple of expensive things to avoid, but there’s no substitute for profiling to see where your game is spending its time)
- Good coding style in Inform 7
- Grammar Token reference ; A touchable thing can be neither
- If you’re encountering memory limits in compilation, see Memory Limit and Storage Variable Limit settings or try Inform 6 6.36, which uses dynamic allocation and does away with these limits.
- Most common 'mistakes' and 'crutches' for those starting out with inform 7?
Bugs
Mantis, the bug tracker mentioned in the documentation, is no longer available and there is no news about when a replacement may be operational. In the meanwhile, bug reports on the I7 IDEs could be made at:
- The macOS IDE github repo
- The Windows IDE github repo
- The Gnome IDE thread here
There are known bugs in 6M62 (and documentation bugs in the docs). The 6M62 Patches by Friends of I7 extension provides fixes for a few known issues. The unofficial I7 Bug tracker provides a place to search for them or share your own bug report. As an unofficial bug tracker, it’s just for information’s sake: to search for and discuss issues and workarounds. It has only been around since June 2021 but already has useful content.
Inform 6 bugs can be reported at the Inform 6 github repo (but you would likely be advised to upgrade to the current version, 6.35; the IDE packages include 6.33N.) There isn’t a way to search for known issues in cBlorb or to report them.
The old Inform 7 suggestion forum and some Mantis bugs are accessible via the Wayback Machine. The highest numbered bug mentioned in 6M62’s change log is 0001800; 0002217 from 2019-11-26 appears to be the latest bug the Wayback Machine has a reference to.
Infrastructure
Inform 6 compiles to your choice of glulx or the Z-machine (v8 only – I7 games don’t fit in the other versions). Glulx interpreters include:
- glulxe, the reference implementation (C)
- git (C) (It existed by that name before the version control system existed.)
- quixe (Javascript)
- Zag (Java)
- Emacs-glulx (Elisp)
There are many Glulx interpreter applications built for particular systems that include Glulxe, Git, or Quixe. These interpreters make their I/O calls to the Glk API and must be accompanied by a Glk library to actually be useful (Emacs-glulx and Zag’s Glk implementations are built-in). Some significant implementations:
- cheapglk (no window, no status line, just streams of input and output; of interest largely for testing and development)
- glkterm (uses the curses library, widely available in any UNIX-like environment)
- glktermw (glkterm with “wide char” support, i.e., it can handle Unicode non-Latin-1 characters)
- remglk (doesn’t directly receive user input or display output to the user; it receives and emits JSON objects, allowing use by other applications potentially across a network)
- glkote (the Javascript implementation used by Quixe)
- garglk (the Gargoyle multi-system interpreter uses its own)
- CocoaGlk (used by the I7 Mac IDE)
- WindowsGlk (used by the I7 Windows IDE)
- Async Glk Dannii Willis’ Typescript implementation, used by Parchment
References:
- Roger Firth and Adam Thornton’s Brief Glk, via Grokking Glk
- Andrew Plotkin’s The Game Author’s Guide to Glulx Inform and Glulx Inform Technical Reference
- Adam Cadre’s Gull: an introduction to Glulx Inform
There are countless implementations of Z-code interpreters, including:
- the venerable Frotz
- Bocfel, which uses Glk and offers a lot of interesting comand-line flags; see Bocfel’s man page
- ifvms.js, the Javascript Z-code interpreter used by Parchment
- entertaining ones: Z-machine in hardware, Z-machine on a pen
Refs:
- The Z-machine standard
- Michael Ko’s Internal Secrets of Infocom Games
- Jeff Nyman’s Zifmia: Z-machine terp tests
Tools and Projects
By Andrew Plotkin:
- blorbtool.py – manipulate blorbs
- ifsitegen.py – go from a zcode file, glulx file (.ulx), or blorb to a playable website; processes images from blorbs better than I7 itself
- I7 source highlighter with I7 to HTML and Inform 7 to rtf options
- regtest – regression testing for IF running on any interpreter that uses simple input and output streams for I/O, like Frotz’ dfrotz variant or anything built with CheapGlk, or with anything using RemGlk; Nils Fagerburg wrote a regtest bash completion script
- profile-analyze.py – parse profiling data from glulxe (when it’s compiled with the VM_PROFILING flag)
- glk-dev includes the latest changes to the Glulx, Glk, and Blorb specs
Others:
- Jacques Frechet’s glulx-strings extracts all strings from zcode or glulx (including when in blorbs)
- Nathanaël Marion’s I7 Text Extractor – extracts strings from Inform 7 source (for ease of proofreading)
- Blaze Alan Marshall’s mrifk Glulx reverse compiler and disassembler
- ztools: the Infocom toolkit, including txd, a zcode disassembler
- Allen Garvin’s ztool, a python port of ztools
- Dannii Willis’ glulx to C decompiler (glulxtoc)
- Juhana Leinonen’s IF recorder is a Parchment plugin to save transcripts
- Gren Drake’s glulx-assemble (a glulx assembler)
- zzo38’s glasm (a glulx assembler)
- Chris Spiegel’s zdevtools (zcode assembler/disassembler)
Some interesting ones for older versions:
- Ron Newcomb’s I7 port of the I7 parser (6G60) There have been changes to the parser since this was current, but the documentation section at the bottom constitutes the best documentation of the I7 parser extant.
- Ron Newcomb’s Naga (zip archive) which strips away nearly all of the Standard Library (6G60)
- Textfyre used a modified version of Glulx with different I/O abstractions from GLK
- Erik Temple’s Glimmr graphics framework; Glimmr Github repo; Glimmr archive including demos (6G60)
- Guncho, the multiplayer I7 April Fool’s Day joke that wasn’t
- Brady Garvin’s i7grip Glulx debugger (6G60)
I7 in translation
- Manifesto for the translation of I7 (PDF) (6G60) by Graham Nelson
- Swedish (6G60) by Felix Larsson
- Italian (6M62) by Massimo Stella, maintained by Leonardo Boselli
- French (6L38) by Nathanaël Marion
- Spanish (6M62) by Sebastian Arg (see also centro de documentación Inform 7)
- German (6G60) by Team GerX
Hosting
Borogove.io hosts games online for free, either uploaded or built with borogove.app. Playfic is similar but uses 6G60. If you upload a story file anywhere on the web, it can be played online via an iplayif.com URL. Or, if you release along with an interpreter you’ll get a collection of files with which your game can be played anywhere on the web you can freely upload arbitrary files (c.f. ifsitegen).
Miscellany
Ryan Veeder’s Basic Autosaving, Advanced Autosaving, Additional Autosaving Techniques
Jeff Nyman:
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Inform 7: All About Rules (c. 5U92)
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Inform 7: Relations (c. 5U92)
- The Well-Versed Informer (PDF) (5Z71)
- The Well-Versed Informer: Foundations (PDF) (5Z71)
- The Well-Versed Informer: Descriptions and Locale (PDF) (5Z71)
- Introduction to I7 (c. 6L02)
- The Rules of I7 (c. 6L02)
- The Actions of I7 (c. 6L02)
Emily Short:
Brian Rushton’s 77 Verbs serves as a trainer in default available commands.
An Inform 7 quine by Juhana Leinonen
inform7tips on twitter offers items of interest to I7 users.
Many links in this post are to Wayback Machine copies of information no longer on the Inform 7 website. Here’s an archived I7 website sitemap.
Language Comparisons
IF Resource Links has much more of interest to IF authors in general, not specific to I7.
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