Cantrip Help



General Information on Cantrip

Cantrip is a client for connecting to MUDs, MUCKs, MUSHes, MUXes, and the like (abbreviated here as MU*). If you're unfamiliar with MUDs, a couple of spots to look for general information are the MUD Connector and the MacOS MUD Zone.

Cantrip "Worlds"

Cantrip is built around connection documents, called Worlds. Each World combines the Connection information for talking to a particular MU*, along with settings for the text appearance (colors and font) in the main Cantrip window, and other General preferences. A world can also contain lists of Triggers and Macros.

Worlds can be saved from the File menu. Worlds placed inside the Worlds folder in the same folder as the Cantrip application are listed in the Cantrip menu and can be opened from there.

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The Cantrip Connection Window

Cantrip connection windows are split into three basic parts:

At the top of the right-hand scroll bar for the Display Console is a small 'split' box. Clicking this box will split the Display Console into two segments. This lets you review your scrollback buffer in the top half while current activity still displays in the bottom half.

Split Windows example

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Getting Started/Setting up a World

Basic set-up for a World is pretty easy:

This basic set-up should work well with most MU*'s. A couple of default settings that you might need to change (located under the General pane of the Settings dialog):

You're now ready to go! Click on the Connect button in the Toolbar, and you're off and running.

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Logging

If you want to capture a record of your online session, Cantrip has a built-in logging feature. Cantrip captures a straight copy of the text that appears in the Display Console and saves it to a plain vanilla text file.

To make a session log:

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Regular Expressions

Regular expressions is a fancy way of saying "wildcard matching." In other words, instead of trying to match a literal string of text, you can enter a pattern - a "regular expression" - that can match several variants of a basic sequence of text. If you have heard of grep or grep searching or grep syntax, you're talking about the same basic thing - grep is a Unix command-line utility that performs searches using regular expressions.

Cantrip uses the regular expression library built into OS X. A full tour of regular expressions is way beyond the scope of this documentation (and when writing this, I was not able to find a reference of what OS X's library actually supports, even on Apple's Developer website), but I try to give some basic regular expression hints.

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Latest Features

The latest cool feature added to Cantrip (as of a14) is the ability to embed scripts in your Triggers, Macros, and Aliases. Currently, the only supported scripting languages are Perl and Applescript, but in the future this may be extended (through plugins) to include others such as Python or Basic.

The method for embeding scripting languages in your Trigger/Alias/Macro scripts is as follows:

	@@scriptName
	commands
	@@end
	
This can be added anywhere in your script, and more than one can exist. For example, I've written a macro that will set the message bar to "Hello World!" and sends "say Hello World!" to the server:
	say Hello World!
	@@perl
	WorldWindow::setMsgBar("Hello World!");
	@@end
	
For a more extensive discussion on scripting, check the Cantrip Discussion Board.

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