Informant - A complete Inform 7 IDE in VSCode - Compile, Play, Docs, Index, Skein, and more!

Technical Development Development Systems
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I’ve just released Informant 1.0.0, a complete Inform 7 development environment for Visual Studio Code. It manages its own Inform tool chains, documentation, compiler integration, and playback environment, so you don’t need an existing Inform IDE installation to use it. Currently I am supporting Windows, Linux, and both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. Enjoy!

Informant_1
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Features and Capabilities

Informant 1.0.0 provides an end-to-end Inform authoring, compilation, playback,
and testing environment. Current capabilities include:

  • Inform 7 language support for .ni and .i7x files.
  • Syntax highlighting and snippets.
  • Creation of new Inform projects and support for existing .inform projects.
  • Private, self-contained Inform compiler toolchains.
  • Inform 7 compilation, Inform 6 compilation, and Inblorb packaging.
  • Compiler diagnostics through VS Code Problems with jump-to-source support.
  • Integrated Inform documentation and generated Index support.
  • Integrated Quixe story playback.
  • Test-story compilation and playback.
  • Skein recording and replay.
  • Informant-native .iskein test vectors.
  • Starter and Continuation Vectors.
  • Test Vector Library and Test Manager.
  • Reusable .icomposition compositions and nested composition playback.
  • Continuation recording from test-story and composition playback.
  • Project-local testing state isolated within each Inform project.

License

The Informant VS Code extension is free software released by OpcodeASM under
the GNU General Public License, version 3 only (GPL-3.0-only). You are free to
use, study, modify, and redistribute Informant under the terms of that license.
The complete license terms are provided in the LICENSE file distributed with
Informant.

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Hi everyone, a small update for anyone working with Informant regarding the i7x extension manager. Inside Informant, you can easily manage the various extensions you have installed for your projects; however, until now I did not have a good way to help people discover extensions they may want to use. I have created guide of sorts to help with this problem:

This guide is now integrated into the Informant documentation as well. One thing I could use help with is testing the various extensions to make sure Informant is working as expected with them. If you happen to be an owner of an extension (or a dedicated user of one), I would greatly appreciate a quick check with Informant if you have some free time to spare. Thanks a lot for your help!