Chapter 1: Welcome to Inform
1.3. The facing pages

This Public Beta of Inform 7 runs on Linux through the text-only interface created by Adam Thornton.

The interface is extremely crude compared to that available on Mac OS X or Windows. The panels that exist are accessible via menu options, and anywhere you see reference to a button, it simply doesn't exist. Go and Release are implemented, as is Compile, which rebuilds the story but does not start it. There is a further settings panel available to you, the IDE settings, which allows you to control which editor you wish to use to edit your project, which browser allows you to view HTML files, which interpreters to use to play your stories, and whether or not these should be run in the background. Users with a graphical desktop are likely to want to choose the background option, while those running only with text terminals will not. To select an option, type the letter indicated on the screen and follow it with the Enter key.

At the start the only panels available are a blank space in which to write the first lines of a new interactive fiction - the Source panel - and this one, the Documentation. Clicking on the other choices will do nothing.

The exception is the Settings panel, which contains some preference settings for the individual project - not the whole application. This is always available, but it controls settings which can be left alone almost all of the time.


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