With actions you'll be able to make MonkeyTerm respond to certain output from the MUD. Unlike aliases, action will act upon something send from the mud, and not on what you type. When you setup an action it will execute a list of commands for you, based on the output from the mud.
If this section seems a bit fuzzy you should read up on the Aliases section where some of the basic ideas are covered.
Say you want MonkeyTerm to automaticly send your name when the muds asks for your name. Let's look at this simple example.
Action Name: Each action needs a unique name. This name should be something that identifies the action, but theorecticly the name is of little importance.
Pattern: As with aliases the pattern can be either a GLOB pattern or a Regular Expression. To make things easy, we'll go for a GLOB pattern. The GLOB patterns always match a whole line, so when you enter the pattern What is thy name? MonkeyTerm will look for a line containing excatly that and nothing more. If you wanted MonkeyTerm to match it anwhere in a line you need to specify that something might come before and after the sentence. The wildcard character * can be used to specify something unknown. So if you want to match the sentence anywhere on a line you could change the pattern to *What is thy name?* instead.
Commands: Whatever is entered into the commands box will be send to the mud once the action is triggered. Always remember to end your commands with a newline (hit the enter key) to indicate that you are sending the text followed by a newline.
For a briefing on the three options in the bottom, check out the help on Aliases
Let's look at a bit more advanced action. This action uses a Regular Expression match to capture the statusline containing hitpoints, mana and moves send from the mud.
Pattern: You can brush up on your Regular Expressions if you want to learn more about advanced patterns, but here is a short description of the pattern. Since Regular Expressions do not automaticly match a whole line (unlike GLOB), the pattern looks for a string containing one or more numbers followed by the text Hp followed by a space, then again one or more numbers followed by the string Ma followed by a space and then one or more numbers... etc. you see were this is going. \d+ means one or more numbers, and when you enter it in parentisis like this (\d+) you tell MonkeyTerm to save the value for later reference (this will be explained under Commands).
Commands: Normally anything entered under commands in aliases or actions will be send to the mud, but it is possible to run a script instead. Scripts are enclosed in the <% %> tags like they are in this example, and are written in VBScript. var("curhp") is a variable and the first line assigns the value of $1 to this variable. $1 $2 $3 and $4 each hold the values saved earlier in the Pattern. Each time you use parentisis in a pattern the value will be saved this way. You can read more about this here.
More advanced actions will be described later.