I’ve found that if you have the Slack desktop client open, Inform 7 starts to act wonky.
Just one example is that “Open Installed Extensions” sub-menu does not appear. There are other instabilities when you are attempting to create an extension when Slack is open. These problems disappear if you close Slack. This happens on El Capitan and Sierra.
Oddly enough, from what I"m seeing, this also happens even if the Slack client is just opened in a browser as opposed to the desktop client.
I’m curious how stable the IDE is for you when you resize the window while it is compiling a story. On Ubuntu 16.10 x64 Linux, it is very unstable. Sizing the IDE window (internal or external) while it is doing almost anything (even indexing) results in it closing. Even copying/pasting a large story source file into the editor seems to make it crash if you touch anything until it is done processing it. I have a 4K display and maybe the higher resolutions aggravate it further.
I imagine it is a real bug in the IDE, but something that is flaky – it will be triggered by different circumstances, or no circumstances, for any given machine environment.
Mac doesn’t seem to have those problems but it’s got its own oddities. The story panel tends to show a “The Zoom interpreter has quit unexpectedly” if you’re compiling with Z-Machine. (Doesn’t seem to happen with Glulx.) If the source text gets pretty large and you open a string or a comment block, the “repaint” can get a little painful.
I’ve actually found the Windows IDE to be the best of the lot. It has an interesting Skein / Transcript set of tabs, whereas my Mac version only has a “Testing” tab. It’s clear they are meant to do somewhat of the same things but, to me, the Windows version is much, much more effective.
Overall, I’m finding the pickings are better across the board for text adventure development on Windows. And here I’m including not just Inform, but also TADS as well as interpreters for both.