Two installations of Inform?

Last year the hard drive on my laptop died, and while I was able to recover most of the data, most of my installations went bust. Luckily, thanks to my pathological need to install things to the “My Documents” folder, that doesn’t include Inform. But now I really want to get in on the latest, but I want to keep the old installation just in case I want to tinker with my previous projects. Would there be any problems with this set-up?

No.

Note, however, that different versions of Inform will generally share their Extensions folder. If you are using different versions of an extension in your different projects, that may post a problem. (If one of the versions is 6L02 or higher you can override the extensions for a specific project by putting them in the .materials folder.)

Years have passed, so I’d like to re-check this. (for Windows 10.)

I’ve been using 6L38 forever, but I’m interested in installing a newer version also. If I install a newer version,

• Will it overwrite any existing extensions?
• Is it likely to cause any other problems or conflicts?

I’ve got two versions of the Windows IDE installed (7/6M62 and 10.1.2) in separate directories and haven’t had any problems. I haven’t noticed any conflicts or issues, though they do share a folder for add-on extensions, which defaults to a subfolder in the user\documents folder – so there could be an issue if you added an updated version so that it overwrote the old version, I suppose. But I’d think you can work around that easily enough by renaming the different versions (you might also be able to specify a separate extensions folder when installing the IDE; I don’t use many extensions and it’s been a couple months since I last ran the installer so I can’t remember whether that’s an option).

As Mike says, newer and older versions should co-exist. There are various ways round them sharing the same directory for extensions etc.: you can specify what that directory is (though it’s a bit of a pain to do), or have project specific extensions in the Materials folder.

Also, Inform 10.1 comes with older versions of the compiler built in - from the Settings tab you can set a project to use 6L02, 6L38, 6M62 or 10.1, so you should most likely be able to get by with just the latest version installed.

Yes, 10.1 has the very helpful feature that you can switch to older versions of the compiler (and standard library) at any point. Keeping the extensions separate is a bit of a pain, but between 6M62 and 10.1 the filename convention for extensions changed, so those ones should be able to coexist.

I installed 10.1.2, and I still have the 6L38 IDE installed as well.

I ran into one issue, which I’ll mention here in case someone else runs into it.

I launched 10.1.2 and created a new project in a different folder. Then I closed 10.1.2 and launched the 6L38 IDE, and selected “reopen last project” (intending to open an old project I had been working on). The IDE crashed.

So I tried again and selected “open an existing project”, and picked the project by hand. That worked.

(I’m guessing this has to do with a directory conflict? It’s an easy workaround, but I’ll admit the crash scared me a bit.)

Is Inform 10 actually out? I went to my usual “Inform 7” page and was directed to the latest release on Github, which is Inform 10.1.2. I suppose it’s no longer called Inform 7?

Yeah, the 7 has been dropped, but Inform 6 is still Inform 6 to keep it distinct. So now it’s Inform 10.1 instead of Inform 7 10.1.

I’m looking at it now; my only problem is the contents tab is white text on eggshell background and searching for the setting to fix that.

That seems likely: both versions of the front-end will use the same registry settings to say what the last project was. So when you clicked “Reopen last project” in 6L38, it tried to load the project created with 10.1.2. That shouldn’t really cause it to crash, but it’s hard to know why without going back to the 6L38 front-end source code and debugging it, which at this point is probably not going to happen