Up to Main Index                          Up to Journal for November, 2016

                   JOURNAL FOR SATURDAY 5TH NOVEMBER, 2016
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: A fix for Windows TELNET woes
   DATE: Sat  5 Nov 21:37:19 GMT 2016

Tonight is Guy Fawkes or bonfire night, so as I write this there are a lot of
fireworks going off outside :)

Since the release of v0.0.1 of WolfMUD I've had some comments from frustrated
Windows users. It seems that the plain Windows TELNET client does not have
even basic line editing. As a result, if you type something like "inc", press
delete and change the "c" to "v" and then press enter on the resulting "inv"
you still get the not understood, or "Eh?", response.

So what's going on here?

It turns out that the Windows TELNET client is just sending the unprocessed
string to the server, including the DEL (ASCII 0x7F or "\b") characters.

So in the above example we think we are sending "inv" but are really sending
"inc\bv" to the server instead.

Now I could just tell Windows users to go and download Putty[1] and use that
instead. But I really try to make things easy for my users. So I have just
finished implementing a fix which turns the unprocessed string into a
processed string on the server side. It would be appreciated if any Windows
users could try the fix on the dev branch and provide some feedback.

I do, at some point, plan on improving TELENT support for WolfMUD. In the
meantime I hope this fix makes things easier for some users.

At the moment I have several changes I am working on in relation to the text
package, testing and colours. So I thought I would use Git's new worktree
feature to develop the TELNET fix. For reasons I am not sure of, things didn't
work out. A simple compile in the worktree, before making any changes, failed.
I think it was due to the compiler being able to see all of the sources
instead of just the copy in the worktree but I really didn't feel like trying
to sort things out right then :(

--
Diddymus

  [1] Putty homepage: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty


  Up to Main Index                          Up to Journal for November, 2016