nethack-el

What happens when you combine the most advanced, self-documenting, customizable, extensible real-time display editor, Emacs, with nethack, the most elaborate role-playing environment ever invented?

You get the most advanced, elaborate, self-documenting, customizable, extensible, role-playing environment in the world!

All of the Elisp is GPLv2, and the patches are under the modified 3-clause BSD.

Features

• Customizable keys
• Customizable colors
• Macros
• Event hooks
• All the beauty that comes with Emacs
• Play on remote nethack-el servers

Background

This is a fork of nethack-el where I attempt to update it to 3.6.6.

Looked pretty dead when I first stumbled upon it, and also incompatible with anything newer than 3.4.3. This is my go at making it work again.

I'm also having a go at trying to make it parse .nethackrc for things like MENUCOLORS and hilite_status.

Old website: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/nethack-el

Build and run

The following section is nearly copied verbatim from the old INSTALL file.

These instructions are known to work on *NIX systems (sorry Windows users).

Easy installation

• Install the Elisp sources

  • Add the nethack-el folder to your Emacs load-path.

  • Make sure you have all of your dependencies installed. You'll need make, gcc, bison or yacc, flex or lex, and the ncurses-dev library for your system.

  • Add the following line somewhere inside your init.el:

    (nethack-install)

    This will download, patch, and build a NetHack lisp patch, and also sets the variables for nethack-el to detect the executable.

  • Play with M-x nethack RET.

Manual Build

These instructions are known to work on *NIX systems (sorry Windows users).

• Download either nethack-366.tgz from https://nethack.org.

  • 331, 340, 341, 342, 343, and SLASH'EM 007e0 and 007e3 are not really functional any more due to a major charge to the way statuses are passed between the C and Lisp halves of nethack-el.

• Untar the package and apply the respective patch

  For example, if you were installing 3.6.6, you would do something like:

  $ tar xzf nethack-366-src.tgz
  $ cp enh-366.patch NetHack-NetHack-3.6.6_Released
  $ cd NetHack-NetHack-3.6.6_Released
  $ patch -p 1 < enh-366.patch
  

• Follow the instructions in sys/*/Install.* or NewInstall.*

  • This may be as simple as running sys/unix/setup.sh to copy the Makefiles.

  • For the 3.6.6 patch, included is a hints file under sys/unix/hints/linux-lisp based under the default Linux one, which builds into wherever the PREFIX environment variable points to at runtime. You may want to edit the linux-lisp hints file before running something along the lines of:

    $ cd sys/unix
    $ vi hints/linux-lisp
    $ sh setup.sh hints/linux-lisp
    

• Compile (from the toplevel)

  • Following the instructions as outlined so far, that would be:

    $ cd ../..
    $ make all
    $ make install
    

• Install the Elisp sources

  • Edit the Makefile in the nethack-el directory to set the location of your Emacs.

  • Byte compile (not strictly necessary).

    $ cd .. # Or wherever nethack-el is located
    $ make all
    

  • Place the *.elc or *.el files in your load-path.

  • Add the following lines somewhere inside your init.el:

    (autoload 'nethack "nethack" "Play Nethack." t)
    (setq nethack-program "/PATH/TO/PATCHED/nethack")

  • Play with M-x nethack RET.

Play NetHack over a network

Because nethack-el communicates with nethack over a text stream, that stream can be either a subprocess or a TCP stream. Follow these steps to play nethack-el over the internet:

• On the server

  Edit the config values USER_FILE, CHROOT_DIR, SHED_UID, and SHED_GID in nhlaunch.c. Compile nhlaunch.c (instructions are at the top of the file).

  USER_FILE is the file that will store the users and passwords

  CHROOT_DIR is the root directory that contains a fakeroot installation of nethack and any libraries required.

  SHED_UID is the UID that nhlaunch will change to when loaded.

  SHED_GID is the GID that nhlaunch with change to when loaded.

• On the client (in Emacs)

  M-x nethack-connect-to-server RET

  Type the server and the port. Enjoy! Now everyone can play on the same server using their own Emacs.