Cancan is an interactive utility similar to telnet, but providing some functionality that is especially useful for playing text based multi-user games such as MUDs. However, its use is not limited to mudding. You can connect to normal telnet or any service that works with plain telnet.
Some features that cancan offers:
- basic telnet protocol handling
- a simple input line editor with history and completion
- key bindings that can be customized
- input line highlighting and text markers
- actions (regular expressions, simple, exact)
- aliases and a number of builtin commands
- variable and arithmetic substitutions
The tarball with sources is here: cancan-2.8.0.tar.gz