Tinyfugue

So, I’ve been planning for ages to get around to writing a page on general TinyFugue (most people just call it ‘TF") usage, and assorted lesser known tricks and tips and stuff. Especially as the help and interface isn’t exactly user friendly. :) Initially there won’t be a lot here, but I’ll slowly expand it as I get time and inspiration to write stuff.

First things first, here’s a ‘probably not for newbies’ short note I wrote on building a version of TF with unicode support. I’m adding this first so I can take it off of the already messy menu bar. :)

Generic Tips and Stuff

  • You don’t actually need all the seperate files TF will use when you use the various /save* commands. You can stick everything in .tfrc if you want to (fewer files to worry about). The drawback is that you’ll have to edit the files by hand. The /save commands won’t help any.

  • As time goes by (especially if you use the previous tip), your .tfrc may get fairly large and you may wish you could keep it in version control, or stash it away in a .config directory. If you create a shell script in your PATH containing the following code you can store your .tfrc in ~/.config/tf/.tfrc and then use git or whatever you like. Not to mention this helps keep your home directory neater. :P

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/tf -f"~/.config/tf/.tfrc"

Commands

A lot of commands in TF (like /gag, /hilight, /hook, etc) are just front ends for the /def command. You can do a lot more with /def than you can with the front end command, but the commands are usually simpler to use. This section will have links to sub-sections covering individual commands.

Useful tricks

/limit and /recall

  • If you’re using a MUCK, and you’ve been AFK for a while, you can list pages and whispers with /limit -mregexp (page|whisper). Just use /unlimit when you’re done.

  • If you’d like timestamps too, instead do something like /recall -t -mregexp /20 (page|whisper). If you add # (/recall -t -mregexp # /20 (page|whisper)) then you get buffer line numbers too, which you can use for things like getting context, or dumping stuff to a log file.

  • You can list out things you’ve missed because of gags with /recall -ag /50. If you do the colored gags down below, they’ll be colored too.

/gag

  • You can prevent things like save warnings from triggering activity notices in background worlds by making a trigger something like: /def -p1 -aA -mglob -t'## Saving changed objects*' noact_db_save.

  • If you add a color argument to /gag like this /def -F -agCmagenta,Cbggrey2 -t'something to gag' gag_something then you can list gags and they’ll be highlighted. Makes it easy to see what you’ve blocked.