Blightmud : A mud client for the terminal

Blightmud has been a passion project of mine for some time. A big user of the old but great tinyfugue I always wanted to create my own similar mud client. Even though I don't play much muds these days.

The name?

The client is written in rust. Some navigating throught the thesaurus brought me to the word blight and here we are.

Features

• Completely terminal based (mac and linux)
• Telnet:
  • TLS
  • GMCP
  • MSDP
  • MCCP2 (compress2)
  • NAWS
  • TTYPE
  • TELNET CHARSET
  • MSSP
• Lua scripting:
  • Output and sending
  • Aliases
  • Triggers
  • Timers
  • Customizing status bar
  • Persistent storage
  • Session storage
  • Keybindings
  • Audio playback (music/ambiance and sound effects)
  • Text-To-Speech
  • Mouse scrolling
  • Plugins
  • Sockets (TCP connecting and sending only)
  • Spellchecking
• Low resource and fast
• In client help and manuals
• Native Text-To-Speech functionality (optional compile)
• Text searching
• Tab completion
• Split view when scrolling
• Screen reader friendly mode

Demo

Installation

• Ubuntu/Debian : Deb packages can be found on the releases page
• Archlinux/Manjaro : Packages are available on AUR
• NixOS/Nix : Packages are available in NixPkgs, or from our Flake
• Mac/Homebrew : We have a homebrew tap brew tap Blightmud/blightmud (Apple Silicon / ARM64; if you're on Intel (x86_64) compiling is the best option)
• Cargo : If you have rust installed just run cargo install --git https://github.com/blightmud/blightmud blightmud from your favourite terminal.
• Other/Alternative : Download source and run cargo install --path . from the project root
• Windows : No native windows support but Blightmud runs fine under WSL

Usage

The following command line options are available when running Blightmud from a terminal:

Option	Description
-c, --connect <HOST:PORT>	Connect to a server on startup
-t, --tls	Use TLS when connecting (only applies with --connect)
-n, --no-verify	Don't verify the cert for the TLS connection
-s, --script <PATH>	Launch using the provided script instead of the defaults
-T, --tts	Use the TTS system (only in builds compiled with TTS)
-w, --world <WORLD>	Connect to a predefined world
-r, --reader-mode	Force screen reader friendly mode
-V, --verbose	Enable verbose logging
--no-update-check	Skip checking for new Blightmud versions at startup
--codec <CODEC>	Specify the codec to use for the MUD (eg. UTF8)
-v, --version	Print version information and exit
-h, --help	Print the help menu and exit

The authoritative list for your build is always available by running blightmud --help, and the same reference is available in-client via /help command_line.

Compiling

• Install rust
• Run cargo build to compile
• Run cargo run to run

Dependencies include, openssl, alsa-libs and pkg-config

• Ubuntu apt install pkg-config libssl-dev libasound2-dev libclang-dev (libopenssl-dev on older versions)
• Arch pacman -S pkgconf alsa-lib openssl clang

Compile with text-to-speech

• Install rust
• Run cargo build --all-features to compile
• Run cargo run --all-features to run

In order for this to build correctly you will need to install some additional dev dependencies: libclang and libspeechd. Below are some installation commands that might fit your system:

• Ubuntu apt install libclang-dev libspeechd-dev speech-dispatcher speech-dispatcher-espeak espeak
• Arch pacman -S speech-dispatcher espeak

Compile without spellchecking

Some users may encounter issues building the spellcheck feature on MacOS ARM64 (M1/M2). To build Blightmud without the spellcheck feature, use --no-default-features. E.g.:

• Install rust
• Run cargo build --no-default-features or cargo build --no-default-features --features text-to-speech
• Run cargo run --no-default-features or cargo run --no-default-features --features text-to-speech to run

Compile without audio

If you're running Blightmud on a server or system without ALSA/audio libraries, you can disable audio support to avoid requiring these dependencies:

• Install rust
• Run cargo build --no-default-features --features spellcheck
• Run cargo run --no-default-features --features spellcheck to run

You can combine with other features as needed:

• With text-to-speech: cargo build --no-default-features --features spellcheck,text-to-speech
• Minimal build (no audio, no spellcheck): cargo build --no-default-features

Nix

If you're using Nix or NixOS you can try Blightmud right away with:

• nix run github:blightmud/blightmud

For developers, once you've cloned this repo you can use the Blightmud flake directly, or with direnv, to have a ready-to-go and self-contained build environment:

• Run nix build to build Blightmud without text to speech.
• Run nix build .#blightmud-tts to build Blightmud with text to speech.
• Run nix develop to enter a dev. env. with Rust nightly.
• Run nix develop .#stable to enter a dev. env. with the latest stable Rust.

Support, questions and help

Join our discord post an issue or post a question in discussions

Contributing

All contributions are welcome. Check out contributing guidelines.

Side notes

This is my first rust project that has actually grown a bit. Some things might look silly but thanks to rust they should still be safe. Anywho. If you find some antipattern where you have a better idea I'm more then happy to se the PR and learn some more rustier ways.