When accessing Hippo from a lab computer in the ES building, you will most likely be using tkmoo or some other specialised window-using moo client. This enables you to cut and paste text, scroll through previous commands with the up and down arrows, and use various other 'slick' shortcuts.

It is also possible to connect to Hippo via a more primitive program: telnet. While it is more 'bare bones' than tkmoo, it is this simplicity that makes it able to run on a wider range of types of connections, e.g. over an ordinary dial-up modem line or from a 'dumb terminal'.

There are Help Desk pamphlets detailing hints for connecting to a University modem server and using telnet in general. This tutorial deals with a couple of Hippo-specific issues relating to using telnet as your moo 'client'. It assumes you have created a character on Hippo already and that you can establish a dialup connection with a University network computer.

Once connected to a modem server, or some other machine on the University network, the command

telnet river 4114

will seek a connection to Hippo. Whereas tkmoo has a pop up login window, when logging in, as with most other things on telnet, you have to do so manually.

Enter

connect mycharactername

and you will be prompted for your password, which will not be echoed on the screen. It is possible but not recommended to type your password on the same line as the connect command, following your character name, but in this case it will be echoed back to the screen.

There are a few settings on your character that may need to be adjusted to make best use of your telnet session. Two of them control how text appears on your screen and the other enables you to use the moo editors for writing notes, verbs, etc or sending mail.

If lines are truncated, i.e. the ends of long lines do not appear on your screen, adjust the line length with the command @linelength. A very common standard size for terminals is a line length of 80 characters, which you can set with

@linelength 80

Of course you can set whatever line length gives you the best results.

If the text scrolls off the top of your screen too quickly for you to read, you can set the maximum number of lines to appear at once with the @pagelength command. A common number of lines available on a standard terminal screen is 24 (plus a status line), so

@pagelength 24

should enable you to not miss anything. You can reset the page length to whatever number of lines is best for you.

When using @pagelength, when more lines are sent than will fit on a single screen, a message will appear with the word More and a number of lines remaining. You can type

@more

to read the next screen, or

@more rest

to have all the remaining lines appear with no breaks, or

@more flush

to discard the remainder of the current output without you seeing it. To return to 'unlimited' page length such as you would use in tkmoo, type

@pagelength 0

The current settings of both @linelength and @pagelength can be seen by typing the commands with no following number.

In tkmoo often people take advantage of the special local editor for handling their moo mail, editing verbs etc. This is not available on telnet, and you must use the built in moo editors. To enable access to them, type

@editoption -local

This means that commands such as @edit, @send and @write will give access to the builtin moo editors, each of which has a similar but slightly different set of commands. For help on using these editors, type 'look' after starting them up.

When you next access Hippo via tkmoo, your popup windowed editor with cut and paste, etc, will need to be enabled by the command

@editoption +local

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Last updated: August 25, 2001.