Intro

Let’s start with the basics:

Ink is an open-source narrative scripting language created by the company Inkle. It comes with its own editor called inky.

The ink language allows you to write complex branching stories with many choices in a “controlled-chaos” manner. It also comes with a compiler that lets you play your stories as well as diagnose issues - it’s called inklecate

Inky is an excellent tool that lets you write your story, playtest it, view the knots/stitches in a tree view, and so much more. It is a great piece of software that I think you should use - but if you’re like me and you want to take advantage of vim-motions or your existing neovim config, then keep reading.

Syntax Highlighting

Unfortunately there isn’t a treesitter grammar written for ink yet. Someone has created regex-based highlighting though, and that will do for now.

-- lazy.nvim
return {
  "ahayworth/ink-syntax-vim",
  ft = "ink",
}

Voila! We now have syntax highlighting for a lot of the language. Moving on.

Language Server?

There is no official LSP for ink. The inklecate compiler however does provide errors and warnings that we can parse using none-ls.

The first step is to download the latest release of the compiler. Place it somewhere on your computer, and then add that location to your PATH variable if necessary.

Next you’ll configure none-ls to use it.

local nls = require("null-ls")
local helpers = require("null-ls.helpers")
local inklecate = {
  method = nls.methods.DIAGNOSTICS,
  filetypes = { "ink" },
  -- null_ls.generator creates an async source
  -- that spawns the command with the given arguments and options
  generator = nls.generator({
    command = "inklecate",
    args = { "$FILENAME" },
    to_stdin = false,
    from_stderr = false,
    -- choose an output format (raw, json, or line)
    format = "line",
    check_exit_code = function(code, stderr)
      local success = code <= 1
      if not success then
        -- can be noisy for things that run often (e.g. diagnostics), but can
        -- be useful for things that run on demand (e.g. formatting)
        print(stderr)
      end
      return success
    end,
    -- use helpers to parse the output from string matchers,
    -- or parse it manually with a function
    on_output = helpers.diagnostics.from_patterns({
      {
        pattern = [[([^:]+): '([^']+)' line (%d+): (.*)]],
        groups = { "severity", "filename", "row", "message" },
        overrides = {
          severities = {
            ["ERROR"] = 1,
            ["WARNING"] = 2,
            ["TODO"] = 3,
          }
        },
      },
    }),
  }),
}
nls.register(inklecate)

This gives us the same LSP functionality as in Inky!

What next

Sadly that’s all I’ve been able to replicate so far in neovim. I’ll continue to update this blog as I find new ways to integrate ink into neovim, so check back later. 🙃

Next steps for the ink-neovim community:

  • treesitter grammar
  • playtesting plugin
  • tree view
  • multi-file support