Nerdstation

MUD Client for Maemo

18-10-2009 tags: discworld maemo mud pygtk python

I'm tinkering a bit this weekend with hacking a (Discworld) MUD client for the Nokia N900 running Maemo 5 Linux. I've never before worked with PyGTK, but I am pleasantly surprised with this library. I have to say that compares really well against TkInter and WxPython with which I have tinkered before. (the MUD client I'm normally using on my macbook uses TkInter for instance)

And yes, it's evolved from modifying a helloword.py example for PyGTK. :) It's under 200 lines of code at the moment, but that's not a surprise since it hardly has any features. It does have an nifty menu which gets displayed when you click on the title bar (indicated by the little blue triangle next to the title). This menu can be used to open a connection to a MUD and to change the used font and fontsize.

Another nifty feature has to do with the input. Normally the N900's slide out keyboard just types it's commands into the entry field at the bottom and when you hit enter, this gets send to the server. However, if you press ctrl the input from the keyboard switches to a different mode. In this mode every key (except ctrl of course) can be mapped with a shortcut alias which gets send to the MUD when that key is pressed. So on the right side of the keyboard I have a block of 12 keys allocated to commands for walking around and looking around on the MUD. It takes some getting used to, but I didn't think of a more practical way for that type of input. (and NO, I'm not going to use the accelerometer for that :) )

1 comment has been posted.