Trebuchet Tk

Emailware; $0

Current Version: 1.070 (December 4, 2005)

From the Trebuchet Tk home page: "Trebuchet Tk is a client program for connecting to TinyMUD style social MUD servers on the Internet. This program is designed to be used with TinyMUD, TinyMUCK, TinyMUSH, MOO, and several other variants. It's probably not well designed for combat oriented MUDs like LPMUD and Diku, but it does support them." Features include:

• TCL/Tk is a powerful extension language, which you can use to add new abilities to the client. You can even create fully interactive GUI dialogs from TCL/Tk scripts. Actually, the entire client is written in TCL/Tk. Yet it's amazingly fast.
• Trebuchet supports MCP 2.1 for close-knit client-server cooperation. It only supports a few (impressive!) MCP packages so far, but it should be trivial to create new ones.
• The server can request the creation of GUI dialogs via the MCP GUI package. This could make in-game bulletin boards, mail programs, and text editors much easier to use.
• If you have the TLS extension to the TCL interpreter installed, Trebuchet will support SSL encrypted connections to MU* servers that support it. The FBMuck 6.0 and ProtoMuck servers have support for SSL.
• You can create Hilites and Triggers that watch incoming text from the world. They can highlight all or part of each line, send automated commands back to the MUD, or even run TCL scripts.
• Pattern matching for highlights and Triggers is very flexible. The matching schemes include "Starts with", "ends with", "contains", "wildcard matching", and "regexp matching."
• Highlight Styles can include text color, background color, font, size, bold, italic, etc.
• Highlight Styles can have StyleMenu entries associated with them, that pop up in context menus when you right-click on the highlighted text. (However, there isn't yet a GUI interface available for setting these. Just a command line interface.)
• You can create command line Macros that can take multiple arguments and expand them out to much more complicated commands or TCL scripts.
• You can create QuickButtons that can send commands or execute TCL scripts with a single click.
• You can create KeyBinds to let you send commands or execute TCL scripts, with just a few keystrokes. (or only one!)
• You can connect to multiple Worlds at once, each one with it's own scrollback buffer.
• You can search scrollback forwards or backwards, using literal text or regular expressions.
• You can Log text from a world to a file, in either formatted HTML or plain text format.
• You can Quote a file to the world, with prepended and/or appended text for each line.
• An integrated Scratchpad lets you edit text files, or jot down descriptions, then send them to a world.
• Almost all these features have keyboard-based methods to invoke them. (Except Quickbuttons)
• All these features have command-line interfaces as well as GUI interfaces.
• Trebuchet is cross-platform, available for Windows 95/98/2000/XP, UNIX with X Window and Mac OS X.

Version 1.070 adds/changes the following:

• Fixed: Some servers send telnet IAC DO LINEMODE, but can't handle the reply.
• Fixed: Various bugs in TELNET protocol and STARTTLS support.
• Fixed: Input buffer can now be resized as small as the scrollbar will allow.
• Fixed: Compass rose no longer sends dicrection commands to the wrong world.
• Fixed: qbutton_minwidth /pref now only affects quickbutton widths.
• Fixed: Improved spellchecker error reporting. Made it not kill standard_timer.
• Fixed: Removed extra newlines from opening and saving text files from textdlog.
• Fixed: /error dialogs should now pop up from the foremost dialog.
• Fixed: Attempted to fix quickbutton layout code.
• Fixed: First-run window size now is reasonable.
• Fixed: MCP dialog creation error with setting max dlog width and height.
• Fixed: Improved window size estimation for first-time run.
• Fixed: Turning off HTML logging now should work correctly.
• Fixed: Various dialogs now start with focus in Name field.
• Fixed: Added validation for various dialogs, before allowing Add/Update.
• Added: Support for TELNET terminal-type reporting.
• Added: /dokey delete_char, to delete the character before the cursor.
• Added: Text dialogs now have horizontal scrollbar, for when word wrap is off.
• Changed: Cut will now refuse to put a null string into the copy buffer.
• Changed: aspell defaults no longer have --lang=en args, so debian works.

You can read about the author's ambitious plans for the software on the Trebuchet Tk home page.

In regard to cost, the author notes: "As with all quality products, there is a cost to pay. In this case, though, the fee is not monetary. My entire asking price is this: If you have a moment where suddenly you find that Trebuchet has done something for you that makes you sit back and go 'Wow!,' drop me an e-mail about it. That will pay me in full."