[IF and Linux] Inform 7

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What is it?

Inform 7 is a new but already widely used interactive fiction language, but also the IDE which has been developed in tandem with this language. (It is not the now version of Inform 6, which it hardly even resembles. The name is a bit confusing.) In terms of writing interactive fiction, Inform 7 is probably the most important application, so it is a top priority for IF on the Linux desktop.

Availability for Linux

When Inform 7 came out, there were a Windows and a Mac OS X version, but no Linux version. (I wrote Fate on Windows.) Today, however, there is a Linux version, thanks to P. F. Chimento; it is written to integrate well with Gnome, and is available as a .rpm for Fedora 10 and as a .deb for Ubuntu 8.10. These packages will presumably also install on other version of Fedora/Ubuntu and on other distributions that use either .rpm or .deb. You can also try to compile new packages from source, which is available from SourceForge.

Finally, there is a command line version of the interpreter available for various hardware architectures, thanks to Adam Thornton--but I won't be talking about that.

Ease of install

If your distribution is supported, installation is trivial. You download the package, double click, maybe give your root password, and that's it.

(The only way to make installation easier would be to get Inform 7 accepted into the official repositories of the major Linux distribution. But since the compiler is not free software, I don't see this happening--which is a shame.)

Functionality

Linux Inform 7 has almost everything that the Windows and OS X versions have: a source window with syntax highlighting, a fully functional index, the ability to compile and play the game within the IDE, and so on. As far as I know, only three things are missing:

1. "Blessing" a part of the skein so you can check whether your transcript changes as you change your code. I never used this in the Windows version, so I don't miss it.
2. You can only play one game at a time within the IDE. If you are working on several projects, you must stop one game before you can play the other. This too is only a minor annoyance.
3. The current interpreter doesn't support Unicode (it is an older version of Gargoyle), which means that it cannot handle indexed text. This is a major annoyance, but I have heard that it will be solved in the next release of Inform 7.

All in all, the functionality of Inform 7 under Linux is good, and chances are that it will soon improve to very good.

Overall

Using Inform 7 under Linux is a good experience, which will probably become even better soon.

(Screenshots

Does anyone know a way to add screenshots to a blogger post that is not a pain to use?)

Comments

  1. Anonymous3 March 2009 at 13:55

    There was an interim release of I7 for Linux in December

    gnome-inform7_5U92.1-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

    I'm sure this update included the lastest Gargoyle, which now has unicode and indexed text support.

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  2. Andrew Hickey3 March 2009 at 15:51

    They've stated an intention to eventually release the compiler under a Free Software licence along the lines of the TeX licence, once it's out of beta.

    I can state for the record though that the .deb packages install fine on Debian (though I did have to symlink a library file because I was using a newer version of a library than it was looking for) as well as Ubuntu.

    ReplyDelete
  3. namekuseijin3 March 2009 at 23:28

    I actually tried install the IDE .deb but my Ubuntu from one generation behind is missing a few libs I don't plan on upgrading any soon. Neither I have had the patience to compile it (although I did compile glulxe).

    I'm using the command-line i7, which works just ok. I open a shell tab with it and another with vim, where I write down the story. Then CTRL+pgUP for the previous tab and C to compile, then CTRL+pgDwn and CTRL+z frotz Project.inform/Build/output.z5 to test it. No syntax highlight, nor skein, but works ok.

    I truly love the natural language subset syntax and the error, I mean, problem reports from the compiler. It's possible to go writing a full I7 basic game by just having a few notions of I7 and following the problem reports on peculiar syntax constructs...

    ReplyDelete

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