macky is a MU* client for Unix systems written in Go and inspired somewhat by suckless.org's ii IRC client.

Like ii, interacting with macky is accomplished through filesystem tools. Commands are sent by piping data to an in FIFO file, and the output is written to an out file. Using a given MU* is then as simple as leveraging cat, tail, echo and the like or as complex as whatever other tools you want to bring to bare.

It works quite well in acme, for example, using two win windows, one reading the out file with tail -f and the other sending commands with cat >> in.

The program expects a certain directory structure, beginning with a connections subdirectory. In this directory, you create additional subdirectories for each separate server account you want to connect to. These subdirectories are where connection configurations are held (in a conf file), and are where the in FIFO and out files are created by the program.

A sample connection configuration is provided.

Just call ./macky

Program messages will be sent to stdout; all else is sent to each connection's out file, including command echoes.

Once started, an in FIFO will be created in the current directory. This file responds to two commands: CTL_CONNECT and CTL_QUIT. See Control Messages below for syntax.

A connection's conf file is a JSON-formatted file with the following fields:

• Address - this is the server address to connect to
• Port - the port to use
• TLS - true/false whether to use secure comms (not yet implemented)
• Login - the login string to use when connected, see below
• User - the username to use
• Pass - the password for the username

The configuration "Login" field is to allow for variances in MU* log in commands, and has a simple formatting. In the sample conf file, the example given is "connect %u %p".

Any %u in the string is replaced with the value in the User field, and %p is replaced with the value in the Pass field.

Special commands prefixed with CTL_ can be written to the in files to control macky itself.

The program control in FIFO, located in the root directory, accepts two commands:

CTL_CONNECT is used to connect to configured sessions, and takes as arguments the names for each connection to make. These arguments should match the name of session directory names under the connections/ directory. You can pass multiple names and macky will connect to all of them.

CTL_QUIT closes all open connections, cleaning up FIFOs, and quits macky.

Each session also has it's own in FIFO. In addition to the above commands, these accept the CTL_CLOSE command, which will close and clean up only the current session.

• Implement TLS support
• A modular "rules" system for doing magic with output