Using Twine/twee without Python installation

Because it seems, that I’ll be writing another Twine/twee interactive fiction in not so distant future, I realized, that there is one thing I’m bothered about twee: I don’t like the act of installing Python and twee. While I have my scripts, this kind of integration of twee and Naracea is still sort of cumbersome. Thus I decided to do something about it.

And because twee is just couple of Python scripts, and I have IronPython integrated in Naracea already, I decided to try how these two things work together. And it seems they work just fine. What twee needs is Python standard library, which I didn’t include into my Python scripting plugin before, but adding support for it was matter of one or two hours.

And after couple tests, I’ve found out that twee indeed works with IronPython, and my test story is built properly.

Thus I took my scripts and converted them into plugin, which can be just unzipped to Naracea installation directory, and you get twee support nicely integrated directly into the editor without need to install either Python or twee itself.

Installed plugin adds two buttons to ribbon Document tab:

Build builds the story (and opens result in default browser), Tweenify sets up the document so it better fits twee coding needs (it mainly sets syntax highlighting and spellchecking based on current branch settings).

At this point the plugin is kind of rough, because I’m not sure whether someone else would find it useful, and for my needs it is good enough. However if you have any improvements requests or suggestions, let me know via Naracea issue tracker.

So if this sounds interesting, you can find the plugin and short installation instructions at Naracea’s plugin page (if you are using .zip package, see also PyScript section of the page for details on Python standard library installation).