Mud Your Emacs!

Version 2.6 released March 3 1999

Releases are infrequent, usually whenever I get sufficiently bored with the other stuff I'm playing with, sufficiently embarrassed about not having released something, or when the wind's blowing in the right direction.

The Source

Click over there -> to download mud.el. There's also a development version of the mud code here, but it's got more bugs in it than is useful, and I won't listen to any complaints about it.

The Hype

This page hosts a mud client written in elisp which is designed to talk to Tom Boutell's PerlMUD. Although originally a solitary gneework of Waider Destructions, Inc., the latest releases contain some significant contributions from Dfan.

Here's the mud.el I used use, more or less.

Features!

There's not much point in writing a new mud client unless it's got something going for it, right? Well, this client has the following:

• Split-window input. You type in one window, output appears in another. This was my principle reason for dropping the other mud.el. Subfeatures of this are:
  • Automatically bounce input to the input window if you try to type in the output window.
  • Automatically bring the output window into view when there's activity on it (can be switched off).
• Multiple muds, simultaneously. Each gets its own pair of windows to play in. Or not. You can have multiple output windows and a single input window. mud.el supports the notion of a default mud where undirected typing goes, and tf/IRC-style '/mudname' stuff for the rest.
• / commands, a la IRC or tf. /join, /list, /input (change default mud).
• Hilighting. Pages, Whispers, URLs and NEW! topics are hilighted. You can set the faces for hilighting yourself, if you grok faces in emacs. There's some help for that in the pipeline, as soon as I find out which pipeline.
• Point-and-shoot URLs. Middle-mouse on a URL in the output window will send your browser off looking for that URL if you have browse-url installed.
• PING support. Ask Rocco about this!
• Firewall support. This is fairly primitive. Currently only supports the type of firewall where you telnet to a gateway host and get a shell of some sort to telnet out from, a la the TIS Firewall Toolkit.
• Log to file, with a customisable logfile-naming function. Can be toggled on-the-fly.
• Audible paging, i.e. if someone pages you, emacs will beep. Switchable.
• Automatic login, complete with configurable default/specific username/password combinations.
• Idle timer. If you're on a connection that times out without traffic, you can set this to run at a suitable interval. Comes in two varieties: silent, which sends a space/backspace down the line, and verbose, which has you do silly things on the mud you're connected to while you're idle.
• Hooks. Most of the internal hookage runs off a single regexp matcher that uses a list of vectors of regexps and functions and blah blah blah blah...

  sorry, I geeked out there. The hooks stuff was rewritten for version 2.5, but there's some more work to do to make it friendly.

• A cutesy internal reporting function that makes it look like mud.el is talking to you. How sweet.
• Dump a file into the mud, using either "say" or "emote" or your local equivalent.
• A menu for the input buffer. Why? Why not?
• You can override the defaults using emacs properties; for example, you can set Nerdsholm to not ping you on pages by doing (put 'Nerdsholm 'mud-page-beep nil) in your .emacs. Previously you'd have had to run up the mud connection before doing this, as the connection init code overrode any existing properties.