Crystal

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We think the best mud client to use is Crystal, but then we did write it.
It currently only runs on the Linux operating system, but there are ways to access it even if you use Windows.
You can get it at https://www.musicmud.org/crystal/

256 colours:
If you want to see the mud in full 256 colours rather than dreary 16 colour mode you will need to set a shell environment variable before you connect:
e.g. in your .bashrc add export TERM256=1 and restart your shell
Then from within the mud type '256' to enable it, and see 'info 256' to test if it works, you should see a nice array of colours, not all white or all red.

Gnu Screen:
Many of use run crystal inside a 'screen' session, which allows us to stay connected forever from a server, while being able to turn our desktop machine off overnight and seamlessly reconnecting to the screen session whenever and from wherever.
If you want 256 colour mode to work within screen you need to make sure your screen binaries were compiled with 256 colours enabled, and you need to make sure your terminal type is one that screen knows can support 256 colours e.g. in your .screenrc try adding
# terminfo and termcap for nice 256 color terminal
term xterm-256color
# allow bold colors - necessary for some reason
attrcolor b ".I"
# tell screen how to set colors. AB = background, AF=foreground
termcapinfo xterm 'Co#256:AB=E[48;5;%dm:AF=E[38;5;%dm'
# erase background with current bg color
defbce "on"

You may also want to bind your choice of function keys to next/previous window so you can have multiple virtual screen windows and alternate between them:
(ctrl-a c to open add a new window)
# f keys to switch between windows
bindkey -k k5 prev # F5 for previous window
bindkey -k k6 next # F6 for next window

NB this may need testing and updating as my .screenrc is full of other hacks that may be related.

If you connect to the linux server via putty from windows you will want to set a few things in the profile:
terminal->Answerback to ^E: xterm-256color
Window->colours-> enable 256 colour mode
connection->Data->terminal type string: xterm-256color

To setup screen for the first time type 'screen' then 'crystal cryosphere.net 6666' and log in.
To reconnect to an existing screen session type 'screen -rd'.
You don't need to quit the mud, just close whatever window/client you used to connect.

You probably also want to enable 'unicode' mode, 'clrstyle', and any other settings people add to this file later.


Crystal's key features:
- page up/down for scrollback, while maintaining visibility of the most recent few rows of output
- current line editing and command history recall with cursor up/down
- highlighting keywords in scroll back - ctrl-] 'match <phrase>' then hit 'tab' key to find previous instances. You can match multiple entries by rerunning for different phrases. ctrl-] 'match' to cancel all current matches.