Coupler
A dedicated client for CoffeeMUD, and for
nothing else. Coupler is built to be the most immersive way to play
CoffeeMUD, for every player, sighted or not: a game you hear as well as
read, in sounds, voices and words, played on the screen, through a
screen reader or with your eyes closed.
Named for the acoustic coupler, the cradle a phone handset sat in to
carry a modem's data. Part of the ansiapps family. Free and open
source under the Apache License 2.0.
Coupler is in development. It runs on macOS first; other platforms
come later.
What it does
- Three ways to play. Terminal (the game's own screen, 80 columns),
Immersive (sound first and self-voiced: cues, a narrator, a voice for
every character) and Workshop (everything at once, arranged your way).
- Accessible first. Everything works from the keyboard and with
VoiceOver. A picture always has the same facts in words beside it.
Speech is kept short: what can be a sound is one. Review mode, sound
captions, readable colors and big text are built in.
- Hears the game. CoffeeMUD's GMCP and MSDP: vitals, fights,
who's talking and where you are, said or played rather than read off
the screen.
- An auto-mapper from the game's room data, with directions in words
and walking a route one step at a time.
- Hooks and assets. Sounds, music, background ambience and ANSI art
on anything the game reports. Coupler's own synthesizer plays MIDI
without a SoundFont, and it can compose music and paint pictures from
your words, all on your computer.
- Room pictures drawn in ANSI by Coupler's own painter.
- A journal of everything said to you, kept on your computer.
Coupler talks to CoffeeMUD and to nothing else: no accounts, no
telemetry, no server of ours. Nothing about you or your play leaves
your computer except what you send the game. The one exception is
yours to turn on: checking for updates (gear menu) asks GitHub which
Coupler release is the latest, sending nothing but Coupler's version.
Building
You need Node.js, Rust (stable), CMake, and on macOS the Xcode command
line tools.
npm install
scripts/pocket-tts-fetch.py # once: the bundled voices' model, ~250 MB
scripts/coffeemud-sf2-fetch.py # once: CoffeeMUD's sounds, 77 MB
npm run tauri dev # a dev build (Vite on port 1460)
scripts/build-release.sh --bundles app # a release Coupler.app
Always build releases with scripts/build-release.sh: it keeps your
machine's paths out of the app, and on a Mac builds it universal,
signed and notarized. Signing needs an Apple Developer ID (the
script's header says how to set it up); COUPLER_UNSIGNED=1 builds
without one, for your own Mac only.
The web build (npm run build:web) is a slimmer Coupler that runs in a
browser.
Tests: cargo test --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml,
cargo clippy --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml --all-targets and
npx tsc --noEmit.
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.md. Security problems:
SECURITY.md. CLAUDE.md is the full set of operating
rules, written for Claude Code and for anyone working on Coupler.
License
Apache License 2.0: see LICENSE and NOTICE. Every
third-party license Coupler ships is in the app, under About →
Open-Source Licenses.
Coupler's protocol handling follows Sip, CoffeeMUD's own client by Bo
Zimmerman. CoffeeMUD is by Bo Zimmerman and its contributors.
