Pinkfish colour codes
It is possible to give your finger/who messages some colour using Pinkfish Color Codes.
Contents
Syntax
Pinkfish colour codes are encapsulated by "%^" and contain the colour that the text following the code should be displayed in, until a line ending or RESET colour code is found. So in order to send the text foobar in red, use %^RED%^foobar%^RESET%^. If you want to quote the literal text %^, it should be sent as %%^^.
If that doesn't work (talker channels) try %%^%%^^^.
General Use (soul commands, spells, etc)
When used in .reference or .plan or soul emotes, these colours only shown if the recipient has "output usercolour = on" enabled. For example: alias .reference %^RED%^This text is red%^RESET%^; %^GREEN%^This text is green%^RESET%^; %^B_MAGENTA%^This text is.. something else%^RESET%^ will result in:
but only if option "output usercolour" is set to "on". The default value for this option is "off".
Use in item descriptions
However, the usercolour setting seems to be ignored when Pinkfish Colour Codes are used on item descriptions. Casting SSS on an item and using pinkfish colours work, even if option "output usercolour" is turned off. For example:
Available Colours
RED BLUE ORANGE YELLOW GREEN BLACK WHITE CYAN MAGENTA B_RED B_BLUE B_ORANGE B_YELLOW B_GREEN B_MAGENTA B_BLACK B_WHITE B_CYAN FLASH BOLD REVERSE UNDERLINE INITTERM RESET WINDOW ENDTERM STATUS
Client Compatibility
Although it was originally intended to convert to ANSI colour encoding, nowadays they are converted to whatever colour system your terminal uses (ANSI, MXP, etc). It is worth noting, however, that CMud (and possibly zMud) as well consider the '%' character a special character, so when entering these codes you may want to turn off Triggers/Parsing.
Beyond ANSI Colours
MXP and Hex Colours
Sometime in 2006 MXP colours were sent by the mud if you had MXP enabled.
At some point Pit also created names for a whole pallet of MXP colours that could be used similarly to the above method of using ANSI colours.
You are able to use any of these named colours or HEX codes with the same method as above, ie encapsulated by "%^". You can also use them in options settings. In some situations you may need to enter colour names in all caps.
Pattern Matching Colours
Honestly, I don't fully understand it myself since I don't think Zmud supports this but here was an interesting conversation on using the mud sent colour codes to pattern match for triggers. Emily (talk) 19:04, 22 April 2021 (EDT)
(Igame) Pit wisps: If your client allows it, trigger on the colour for tells instead.
(Igame) Pit wisps: Because "asks you:" is also the output of a sayto with a question.
(Igame) Quow wisps: Use a hexcode to set your tells to a unique colour (it can be 1 RGB value off it's current value so it looks no different), then nothing else will match - same thing my plugin does with optimise combat triggers
(Igame) Pit wisps: Did I put you onto that, Quow?
(Igame) Pit wisps: Sounds like the kind of thing I'd suggest.
(Igame) Quow wisps: I don't thiiiiink so, but maybeee!? I've had it since I first ever started capturing combat texts, as I didn't want 1500 odd triggers checking EVERY line from the mud
(Igame) MotherGoose wisps: matching colours for pattern... oh I wish. that would be so nice.
(Igame) Pit wisps: Here's the greater hack: if you set your colour to #123456 green, it'll come out as green but *also* send the colour #123456. So you don't even need to change your favourite colour to do this.
(Igame) Swiper wisps: thanks pit, i have no idea what you mean, but i will try it anyways haha
(Igame) Quow wisps: I did *NOT* know that, Pit, that is a nice one, rather than just using a single RGB offset
(Igame) Pit wisps: I believe for talker colour you actually need green #123456 instead.
(Igame) Fernir wisps: i like #00ff00
(Igame) Pit wisps: (Warning: this is the kind of thing that is *not* stable, so future updates to deep code may change this feature.)
(Igame) Quow wisps: If you do want pure pattern match rather than colour though;
(Igame) Quow wisps: ^(?:(?!You )[ A-Za-z](?:\w+\b\W*?){1,9}) (?>tells|exclaims to|asks)(?>.+?you):.+$
(Igame) Quow wisps: That, from the ^ to the $, will match an entire line from start to end, where it's not you telling someone else (negative lookahead of "You" at the start), and is someone else sending you a tell/exclaim/question, the 9 word limit is just to give some sanity, make sure it starts with a letter (as player names do), and cover possible oddities but should cover any name & extra @style they add to the tell, but you could just have .+? instead of [ A-Za-z](?:\w+\b\W*?){1,9}
(Igame) Quow wisps: Note that the mud/my client inserted a space between the [ square bracket and the capital A, there shouldn't be one
(Igame) Swiper wisps: WHY IS EVERYONE TALKING IN ROBOT!
(Igame) Zorgle wisps: (softly) what are you doing, swiper.
(Igame) Pit wisps: To hurt you, obviously.
(Igame) Swiper wisps: haha im kidding :D i love robots
(Igame) Swiper wisps: i wish i can code, im just jelly thats all,
(Igame) Kimo wisps: yeah my eyes crossed trying to read that
