InformSideKick helps you visualize and navigate the structure of your Inform game files.

The catch? It's not stand-alone software. It needs to be run as a plugin for jEdit. But really, it's not all that big of a catch when you consider what a nice editor it is. Cross-platform, extremely configurable, the best soft word wrap I've ever seen, tons of quality plugins like this one... what more could you ask for? If you're an Inform author who hasn't tried jEdit yet, InformSideKick is the perfect excuse.

Features:

• Displays a tree of game objects whose structure reflects the inherently tree-like arrangement of Inform game files, with the option of displaying the entire list of game objects as a flat, alphabetized list. Game entities are represented with color-coded icons:
  
  for objects with identifiers
  for objects that only have a textual description
  for objects that are "found_in" multiple locations
  for objects where a coding error was detected
  for non-object entities -- constants, classes, globals, functions, and verbs
  for the player object
  for the dark object
  for the compass object
  
• Provides proper folding data to the SideKick folding mode, allowing most multi-line entities to be collapsed (see screenshot 1).
• Can use SideKick's completion interface to suggest object attributes provided by the Inform Library (see screenshot 4). This feature could grow into something much larger and more useful, depending upon the amount of interest expressed by users and, of course, the whim of the author.
• Catches a very limited number of coding errors (see screenshot 5).

Caveats:

• If your objects depend upon include files to provide other objects and entities, this may result in inaccuracies in the tree because included files are not examined by the parser. At least, not yet...
• The parser can be very sensitive to syntax errors. For example, if you forget the semicolon at the end of an object, this will result in an innaccurate tree representation of your file.

Download & Install
The easiest way to install InformSideKick is to not use this website at all; just use jEdit's "plugin" menu to open up the plugin manager, switch to the "install" tab, and you should find it soon enough.

Installation can also be performed manually. These are the steps:

1. Satisfy dependencies. Use jEdit's plugin manager to install the ErrorList and SideKick plugins; InformSideKick depends on those plugins for proper functioning.
2. Download InformSideKick.jar.
3. Locate your settings directory. After you've run jEdit at least once, it creates a settings directory called ".jedit" for storing all of your personal settings and plugins you've chosen to install. Non-Windows users: jEdit most likely creates this subdirectory in your home directory. Windows users: Sun's stupid Java VM thinks that whichever folder is the parent of your "Desktop" folder is your home directory, and if you haven't changed the location of your desktop folder, then it probably happens to have guessed correctly, and you'll probably find ".jedit" under "c:\Documents and Settings\[your username]".
4. Install InformSideKick. Simply place InformSideKick.jar into the "jars" subdirectory of your jEdit settings directory.

Contact

InformSideKick was created by me, Jesse Carroll. The address below is obviously not the address where I may be reached, but if you click on this sentence in a Javascript-enabled browser, my genuine e-mail address will be revealed.

12345@nowhere.com