Show HN: A 'Choose Your Own Adventure' written in Emacs Org Mode (opens in new tab)

Ouch.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/25/21720533/netflix-banders...

Theoretically, epub format is ideal for a cyoa format book. Each choice at the end of the page can be a hyperlink to the next (internal) file, and the pages/files themselves could be marked non-linear (so that someone can't just page through to see all the pages).

Unfortunately, Apple and the others who have authored epub clients do not implement it correctly and behave as if non-linear pages are supposed to be some sort of footnote, and pop up models to display them, rather than just treating them as the reflowable content that they should be. Not marking them as non-linear is also problematic, because something about it seems off when you can just scrub through pages in linear order. It's unlikely to ever be fixed either, so the format itself is ruined for this purpose.

I'm close to finishing a commercial interactive story with choices using Ink: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

Ink looks iteresting! Twinery provides a nice visual editor for the passages and branches which I found appealing. Ultimately, I used Mermaid to create visual snapshots of the story which were useful when editing the physical book.

Thank you! I have been an Emacs user/consumer for many years. This project finally got me into the proverbial weeds, a fun venture, learning elisp, exploring the Org code base especially around the export backends [1]. It was useful going through the one.el source code as well, and I now write my blog in Emacs, rendering it using this package [2].

[1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/org/o... [2] https://github.com/tonyaldon/one.el

Install the latest emacs release and you will be able to do `M-x eglot` – this by default knows about language servers for many programming languages, so if you e.g. do this while in a C++ file in some project, it will start clang or ccls (whatever's in PATH); the language server will then be active for all files in that project and you can use `M-.` (xref-find-definitions), `M-,` (xref-go-back), `M-?` (xref-find-references). Try also `M-x eglot-code-actions` on a symbol to see all available actions (renaming, add imports, refactoring etc.; what you get here depends on the language server).

I also use this plugin https://github.com/minad/consult which has the command `consult-ripgrep`, very useful for e.g. looking up all occurrences of the symbol at point (and text navigation across multiple files).

For "AI", start with https://github.com/karthink/gptel/ (its README lists alternative packages, as you can see there is no lack of llm support in emacs, both chat, "agents" and more specific use-cases)

Regarding AI, I don't have a replacement, but for code/text navigation, eglot is a good option.

I think that the AI CLI agents are the response for AI, but for now, I am opening VSCode with an Emacs extension and some keybinding changes.

Thank you for the pointers, I will explore them!

I know not everyone has this distaste for it, but as soon as I hit the landing it was so obviously AI-generated that I had to close it.

Thanks! The story images were made in Google Whisk. The tool allows you to generate a character and then apply the character to a scene separately defined. While more advanced than other image generation platforms, it isn't perfect and the images required lots of editing in GIMP. The vectors (achievement stickers, play cash) were made in Inkscape.