Having auto-save enabled all the time is dangerous because temporary source changes designed for testing can become accidentally permanent. Also, using Save As to try to keep different revisions or backups is not very graceful because it save it as an entirely new project, and not just a revision of the same project.

I've almost lost an entire project when my computer lost power. The file was still there, and was the right size, but it was entirely blank. I suspect this is because Inform keeps the file permanently open and only writes to it after closing the program or during an auto-save.

Can we at least have an auto-backup feature where one former revision is stored as a .bak file? This would be some kind of "insurance" cache against faulty saves, power loss, or losing your undo history to fix unintended mistakes.

Currently it's tricky/annoying writing new accessibility rules because one has to separately check the requirements on noun and second noun, as shown in the "Electrified" example:

if the action requires a touchable noun and the noun is electrified, say "You fear touching [the noun]." instead;
if the action requires a touchable second noun and the second noun is electrified, say "You fear touching [the second noun]." instead.

But internally I6 does have the information about which object-that-needs-touching we're looking at. We just need to expose it to I7, with something like

To decide what object is the touching goal: (or some much better term)
(- (untouchable_object) -).

Make the template layer available for browsing from within the IDE. Minimally, this might mean making the Reserved extensions folder available from within the Extensions menu (probably with a different name, e.g. Templates). More useful would be an Index pane or special documentation page listing the templates and the order in which they are compiled (if this is straightforward). Links from this index could take us to the i6t file and to each template file's documentation (i.e. the docs currently available only in the Appendix A and B pdfs). If the goal is to hide the template layer from most users, perhaps an option in the preferences would be appropriate?

Currently the only way to define a kind of action is to give an example of it; e.g. "Looking is acting fast."

It would be convenient to allow a kind of action to be defined directly, by "Acting fast is a kind of action." This would be especially convenient for extensions that define a kind that may or may not be populated by the authors that use it--for instance, an extension might want to write rules for "acting fast" in case the author wanted to define any actions as acting fast, without forcing any particular action to count as acting fast.

As the author of a number of multimedia extensions for I7, I've heard from a couple of users asking whether there is a briefer way to assign figure names to image files. As I'm working on a WIP that currently has well more than 100 defined figures, I understand why they'd want that. The standard syntax works well for a handful of figures, but there is a lot of extraneous typing when the number of figures goes beyond that. Would it be possible to allow figures (and perhaps sounds) to be defined using special-purpose tables? A simple Table of Figures or Table of Sound Files, with just 2 columns to fill in (figure/sound name and file reference), would be efficient and simple to fill in. A dollop of whipped cream on top of this would be if it were unnecessary to write "Figure of" for each figure-name, this instead being added by Inform when the table is processed.

The current game banner looks like

Release 1 / Serial number 160227 / Inform 7 build 6M62 (I6/v6.33 lib 6/12N) SD

The parenthesized part is boilerplate and conveys nothing useful even for deep I6-hacker types (like me).

- The I6 compiler is packaged with I7 and will not change, unless someone deliberately upgrades it in place -- which is likely to be a bug-fix update that does not change the "6.33" version label. (Yes, I've done this, and no, I didn't touch the label.)

- "6/12N" is hardcoded in the template layer and dates from the era when we thought that the I6 library would be updated in parallel with I7 as a separate project. That never happened, so the "6/12N" is a fossil.

If we knock that stuff out, we're left with

Release 1 / Serial number 160227 / Inform 7 build 6M62 SD

...which is all we want. (Release and SN belong to the game; "Inform 7" is the language; "6M62" is critical info for any I7 bug report; "SD" indicates that it's a debug build, which should always be visible.)

Names of kinds of values can grow to arbitrary length, and it can become tiresome to type them out over and over when working with code that makes heavy use of some particular complex KOV. Therefore, being able to introduce shorter aliases would be useful. It could look something like this:

A sequence transform denotes a phrase list of numbers -> list of numbers.
A number grid denotes a list of lists of numbers.

That's a fairly simple macro system. Slightly more useful would be if we could make generic aliases:

A sequence denotes a list of numbers.
A K transform denotes a phrase K -> K.
A K grid denotes a list of lists of K.

The only complication I can see is that we might need a way to specify plural forms as well. That could perhaps be done as a parenthetical remark after the singular form.

I have projects that are no longer in the history file of Inform. I have associated story.ni files with Inform, but all that happens is the Inform welcome screen appears. So there is no real file association with Inform.

After selecting “Open an existing project” when I move to the folder where the story.ni file is, the list remains blank. Even if I type in the file name (story.ni), Inform will do nothing to open the project. (That is, when I click on Open, *nothing* happens. It doesn’t open the file, it gives no error message, it doesn’t close. It just sits there as if I had not done anything at all.)