Once you are connected to the MUD, you will typically be prompted for your character name and password. zMUD tries to auto-detect this, and will pop-up a dialog with your character name and password and ask if you want zMUD to create an auto-login trigger for you. If you click OK, then the next time you log-in, zMUD will automatically enter your character name and password. If you click Cancel, this trigger will not be created for you. Of course, the next time you log in, zMUD will ask about creating the trigger again. If you want to stop zMUD from auto-detecting your login process, simply go into the character database and fill in a value for your character name.
Note that the text you type appears in the bottom Command Line entry field. When you press <Enter>, the text in this field is sent to the MUD. It is also echoed to your text window if you have the Echo flag enabled (default is enabled) using the current command color (changeable in the Color preferences).
When you enter your password, it will also be echoed to the screen. To prevent this, use the #PW command. Type #PW and press <Enter>. The password for this character that you entered in the Character Database will be sent to the MUD, but it will not be echoed to the text window. Also note that # is the default command character and you can change this in the Preferences dialog as described later.
Once you have entered your character name and password, answer any other questions displayed by the MUD. All of the text that you type will be shown in the command line. You can use the <Backspace> key to edit this line. You can also move the insertion point within the command line by clicking the mouse at the point you want to start typing. If you have a separate set of arrow keys on your keyboard, you can use the right and left arrow to move within the command line. Note that the keys on the numeric keypad have macros assigned to them by default so they cannot be used as arrow keys. When you press <Enter>, the text in the command entry field is sent to the MUD. If the Echo flag is enabled, it will be shown in the large text window in the current command color
You can enter multiple commands on the same line using the Separator character, which defaults to semi-colon (;). Thus, eat bread;drink water will send the two commands eat bread and drink water to the MUD in quick succession. Also, when commands are sent to the MUD from the command line, a newline (CR/LF) is always added to the end automatically.
The command line can contain more than one line at a time. As you type, the text will automatically word-wrap at the right-edge of the line and the command line will expand to show the entire text string. Note that even though the text is displayed on a second line, it is still considered one line by zMUD and will be sent to the MUD as a single line. To add an actual second line, press Ctrl-Enter to force a hard new-line in the command. This works just like the command separator character. To clear the line, press the ESC key. Note that you can turn off the word-wrap setting in the Preferences.
Commands that you send to the MUD are stored in your Command History, which, by default, contains th last 20 command lines you have sent to the MUD. With the cursor on the first line of the command line, press UP-Arrow to recall the last command you entered. Press UP-Arrow again to recall the next command, and so on. If the cursor is in the last line of the command line, pressing Down-arrow will move the opposite direction through the command history. Or, if you have started typing a command, pressing Down-arrow will store the command in the command history without sending it.
The Down-arrow "save" feature is very useful if you are in the middle of typing a long message and you need to do something on the MUD quickly. Just press Down-arrow to save your command in the command buffer without sending it, then type the command you need to send to the MUD quickly and press Enter. Now that the command has been send, press Up-arrow to retrieve your long command and continue working on it, and press Enter when you are ready to send it to the MUD.
You can scroll the main MUD window by clicking the scrollbars to the right and below the main window. You can also use the PgUp and PgDn keys on the keyboard (but again, not the number pad). When you scroll the window, the screen is split, with the scrollback shown above and the live text from the MUD shown at the bottom. The split bar can be dragged to any position to see as much or as little live text as desired. Once the screen is split, the Shift-Up and Shift-Down arrows can be used to move line by line, or the PgUp and PdDn keys can be used to scroll a page at a time. You can still type commands in the command line and send them to the MUD while the screen is split. To unsplit the window and automatically return to the bottom of the scroll buffer, click the Pause button in the lower right corner of the window, or press the Ctrl-Z key, or press the ScrollLock key, or type #FREEZE on the command line. You can also unsplit the window by dragging the scroll bar to the bottom.
You can search for text in the output window using the Find command in the Edit menu, or by pressing Ctrl-F. You can search backwards (default) and forwards through the buffer. Since this buffer can grow quite large, especially in the 32-bit version of zMUD, the Find command is very handy for rapidly locating past text. The screen is automatically split when the text is found so that you can view the scrollback buffer and the live text at the same time.
You can also copy text from the output window and paste it into other programs. When you highlight text with the mouse (click the left button at the starting location, drag the mouse with the left button still held, then release the mouse button at the end location) the screen is automatically frozen to prevent scrolling from disturbing your selection. When you release the mouse button, the text is automatically copied to the clipboard. You can select large portions of text (more that a screenful) by left clicking the start location, the left clicking while holding the Shift key at the end location. If you double-left-click, the word under the mouse is highlighted then copied to the clipboard. If you left-click in the narrow margin to the left of a line, the entire line will be selected.
Contents of the screen are stored to the clipboard in both plain ASCII text format and in color ANSI format. When you paste to an external program like Notepad, the plain text format is used. If you paste to the Command Editor the ANSI color format is used to preserve MUD colors. If you paste to the Command Line, plain text is used unless you have defined a color translation syntax in the color preferences in which case the ANSI color is converted to color commands for your MUD. If you paste more than one line of text into the command line, the line breaks are replaced with the command separator character (;).
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