Nanvaent FAQ: Colour and Terminal settings

Useful Info

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Nanvaent FAQ: Colour and Terminal settings

Please mail all questions to faq@nanvaent.org.

How do I enable colour in Nanvaent?
To be able to see colour on your screen, firstly you must be sure that your computer and the application you are using to connect to Nanvaent (ie. your telnet application or MUD client) can support colour. Most good MUD clients can handle colour, and if you are using a telnet application or telnet from a UNIX terminal of some kind you may have to consult documentation or ask someone at your organisation if they can help.

Once you are satisfied that you should be able to see colour you have to tell Nanvaent that you want to see colour. This can be done with the term <type> command. Typing term on its own will give you a list of available terminal settings and tell you your current terminal type. The ones which support colour are 'ansi' and 'xterm' they differ slightly in the way they support background colours, you will have to test which is better for you. So typically you will simply have to type term ansi to enable colour on your screen.

How do I set colours for channels and tells etc?
Nanvaent allows you to set colours for different parts of the game. This is done using the colours command. Typing colours on its own will show you your current colour settings. The defaults will look something like this:

 exits           : green     ( default - green )
 guild-channel   : magenta   ( default - magenta )
 soul            : none      ( default - none )
 say             : cyan      ( default - cyan )
 shout           : none      ( default - none )
 tell            : red       ( default - red )
 combat          : none      ( default - none )
 inform-channel  : bold      ( default - bold )
 channel         : cyan      ( default - cyan )

To change your colour settings you use the colours command by passing generally two arguments in the form colours <name> <colour> for example colours tell cyan. The colour argument can be the name of a colour, none or default. The name argument should be one of the setable names such as exits or tell, the full list is given when you type colours on its own.

The name argument can also be the name of a colour. For example, it is valid to type colours red blue. This would for most people be a silly thing to do, but in some cases it may be useful, such as if red did not show up well on your background, or maybe if you were colour blind, you could tailor the colours to suit you better.

Not all terminals support all colours, you can find out what all the colours look like on your screen by typing colours test.

How do I put colour into my own commands?
It is possible to type colour codes into what you say, tell, channels or many other commands. The use of colour can be annoying to some people so please do not overuse colours, especially on public channels.

To say something in colour you have to put a colour code in what you type. A colour code looks something like %^RED%^ so if you wanted to say hello in red you would type say %^RED%^Hello%^RESET%^. You will noice the RESET code at the end, it is best to do this otherwise on some terminals the next line will also be in red. All colour codes consist of the characters %^ followed by the name of a colour (always in uppercase) and another %^ code. It is possible to use the symbolic colours names such as tell and exits, but this wouldn't be that useful.

A full list of colours can be seen with the colours test command.

How do I set the size of my screen?
Nanvaent will try to figure out the size of your screen for you; however, this will not always work, and has to do with the client application you are using. If Nanvaent is not getting this correct and things are going off the end of your screen or wrapping too early you can disable the autodetect feature by typing

screendetect
 off

To set the size yourself you can use the rows <number> and cols <number> commands to set these.

My terminal type keeps changing when I log on, what is happening?
Nanvaent tries to figure out your terminal type when you log on. This can be a useful feature if you log on from different places regularly. If, however, Nanvaent gets this wrong and keeps setting your terminal type incorrectly you can disable this feature by typing termdetect off.

I am using TinyFugue and it keeps wrapping lines one character before the end of the screen, what should I do?
Those of you using TinyFugue as a client will probably have noticed its annoying habit to wrap lines at one character before the actual end of the line. This results in lines containing either one word or one char. This can be fixed by putting the following in your .tfrc file:

 /def -hresize dummyname = /set wrapsize=$[columns()]
 /eval /set wrapsize=$[columns()]

Questions? Contact us at webmaster@nanvaent.org