Combat Colours
The following techniques are within the game rules. See the above paragraph for a warning against misusage of triggers. If you abuse triggers then you are likely to be spotted automatically by the game itself or other players. Do not use illegal triggers. Triggers are only legal if they send no output to the MUD and only affect your own PC. I can't stress this enough!
As always, I will be describing the MUSH method of implementing combat colours. See the Links section if you need to download MUSH.
From within MUSH client go to the triggers section. It should be a button at the top that looks like a set of lines. One of the lines is yellow and has an arrow pointing to it. If you can't see it then press Ctrl+Shift+8 which will also take you there.
Make sure "Enable triggers" is ticked.
Now click the "Add" button to add a trigger.
Ensure that you tick both "Enabled" and "Ignore case" in the new dialog. Most of the other options we can ignore. We will need to define the trigger conditions though.
In the box next to the word " Trigger" type "*You killed*". Include the asterisks but not the quotes. In the "Change colour and style to" drop down box, pick "Custom 9" or a colour of your choice. Click Ok. Click Save and save the file. Now click Ok again.
The next time you kill somebody it will highlight the fact with purple text.
You can expand this idea by colouring hit descriptions too. The trigger phrase "*make a kebab*" could be set to trigger a colour change to Custom 11 (orange) for example. Repeat this with all the descriptions of your own hits but not the enemies.
Now, in combat, every time you hit it is shown in orange. If you kill somebody it is shown in purple. Combat monitor text defaults to green anyway. All other messages, such as when you get hit are shown in white.
It is less effort than it sounds as triggers can be added over time when you realise you've missed one. I think it makes a big improvement to the readability of combat.