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TinyFugue

The classic UNIX terminal client. Upstream has not released since 2007; a maintained fork carries it forward.

https://tinyfugue.sourceforge.net/ · Linux, macOS, BSD

Capabilities

3 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.

Client capabilities, each read off the project's own documentation. Unknown means we did not establish it, and never that the client lacks it.
capability documented source
screen reader unknown we did not find one
TLS yes tinyfugue.sourceforge.net
UTF-8 unknown we did not find one
MCCP yes tinyfugue.sourceforge.net
GMCP unknown we did not find one
MSDP unknown we did not find one
ATCP unknown we did not find one
MXP unknown we did not find one
MSP unknown we did not find one
scripting yes tinyfugue.sourceforge.net

TinyFugue — "tf" — is the terminal client a large part of the MUSH world used for two decades, with separate panes for input and output, a macro language of its own, and a set of habits that have outlived several of its competitors.

Upstream is dormant: the last release is 5.0 beta 8, from January 2007. It still builds and it still works.

A maintained fork, TinyFugue Rebirth, is actively released and adds GMCP, ATCP, wide-character support through ICU, and Python and Lua scripting alongside the native macro language. The table above describes upstream, because that is what "TinyFugue" resolves to; if you are installing today, the fork is worth looking at first.

The trap in this client's documentation

Upstream has a documentation topic called "non-visual mode". It is not about assistive technology — it concerns keeping input confined to the bottom line — and it mentions no screen reader, no speech and no blind users anywhere. A capability table assembled by keyword search would turn that filename into a yes. This one says unknown, because that is what the documentation supports.

UTF-8 is the same shape of answer: the documented encoding support is for 8-bit ISO 8859 character sets, and we found no upstream statement about UTF-8 either way.

See also

  • TinTin++ A terminal client with its own scripting language, on every platform including phones, and a documented screen-reader mode.
  • Blightmud A modern terminal client in Rust, with Lua scripting, built-in text-to-speech and a screen-reader mode that announces itself to the server.