client
MUSHclient
The long-established Windows client. Five scripting languages, a plugin architecture that most of its protocol support lives in, and a release history that has slowed.
https://www.mushclient.com/ · Windows, Linux (Wine)
Capabilities
5 of 10 established from the project's own documentation
Read off each project's own documentation, not measured by us — a client has no handshake for us to observe. "unknown" means we looked and did not establish it. It never means no.
| capability | documented | source |
|---|---|---|
| screen reader | unknown | we did not find one |
| TLS | unknown | we did not find one |
| UTF-8 | unknown | we did not find one |
| MCCP | yes | www.mushclient.com |
| GMCP | unknown | we did not find one |
| MSDP | unknown | we did not find one |
| ATCP | yes | www.mushclient.com |
| MXP | yes | www.mushclient.com |
| MSP | yes | github.com |
| scripting | yes | www.mushclient.com |
MUSHclient is Nick Gammon's Windows client, MIT-licensed, and for a long stretch the default answer for anyone on Windows. It scripts in Lua, VBScript, JScript, PerlScript and Python, and much of what it does is carried by plugins rather than by the core — which is a genuine architectural choice and also the reason several rows above are harder to answer than they look.
The last tagged release is 5.06, from March 2019. The repository is still being committed to, and there are release notes for a 5.07 that has not shipped.
Why so many rows say unknown
Every one of them is a case where the honest answer is "we could not establish it", and the reasons differ:
- GMCP — the project's own page on it presents an example plugin you could write, not a feature the client has. That is different from shipping support, so the cell is unknown rather than yes.
- TLS — the documented method is an external
stunnelprocess. A commit adding OpenSSL-backed TLS landed on the master branch in 2026 and is not in any release, so there is nothing a user can install today that we can point at. - UTF-8 — CHARSET negotiation appears in the unreleased 5.07 notes and nowhere we could find in a shipped version's documentation.
- MSDP — nothing either way.
- Screen reader — a text-to-speech plugin using Windows SAPI ships with the client, and that is not the same thing as screen-reader support. There is no accessibility section in the manual, and the author has described in his own forum why the output window is hard for a reader to work with: it has no concept of a current line. We could not establish an answer, so the table does not give one.
None of these is a no. Several may well be yes and we could not show it.
See also
- Mudlet Cross-platform, Lua-scripted, and the client with the most thoroughly documented screen-reader support in this section.
- Potato MUSHclient A cross-platform Tcl/Tk client written for MUSH players. Good encoding support, and a documentation set that says nothing at all about most protocols.
- MCCP Stream compression. Cheap, widely deployed, and the protocol that produced the most instructive bug in this project's history.