I'm gonna try to be objective here, because I hate VIPMUD. The first difference is the price tag, around $30 for VIP, nothing for MUSH. If you pay for VIP, you're essentially paying to pay free games. second, accessibility, VIP is inherently accessible out of the box, except with NVDA, and V2 is supposed to fix that, whether it does or not I can't say since I have only used V1. MUSH on the other hand takes a little work to get it accessible. The MUSHreader plugin is an essential, as without it, text will not be read as it arrives, although you can still review the output window to read text, this is not acceptable in most cases. Another plugin you'll probably want is capture output, which dumps all incoming text to a notepad window that's a control tab away. The key here is that though new lines are being appended here as they come in, your place in the output window is not altering, in other words, it won't scroll you to the bottom constantly. You use the arrows to read this window like any other text editor. It also gives you control 1-0 to read the most recent lines, 1 being the most recent and 0 being the tenth line. Another plugin you might want is channel history, and this plugin requires a little setup. It gives you buffers you can cycle through with ALT left and right arrow, and logs messages o those buffers and then leaves it for your review with alt up / down arrow. How you set this up is through triggers which match incoming text, the buffers are yours to name. That's about it for plugins unless you want to make sound packs, in which case you'll probably want luaaudio and others.

VIP has a two window approach, the output window and the typing window, which you cycle through with the tab key. In MUSH, tab will try to autocomplete based on things it finds in the output window. VIP has a neat feature of being able to make aliases in the input window by typing out a sequence like a: and some other stuff, which I've not experienced because I only hit that accidentally and its annoying. VIP like MUSh can do aliases, triggers, macros, speedwalking, numpad keys, and I think scripting, though this is a proprietary language. Most of the soundpacks out there are for VIP, a few adventurous souls are using MUSH for SP making, but not many.

If you don't get the capture output window plugin, the only other way to review text is to us jaws cursor / nvda object hav commands, this is the way I do it, I don't like having that window open there, just one more thing I have to cycle through. I have an NVDA addon that will set focus to the output window whenever you alt tab into MC, saing myself two keystrokes.

I prefer VIPMud myself, mostly due to its interface. Having to use the JAWS cursor to review text annoys me to no end. My first client was GMUD, followed by MonkeyTerm. Both clients required me to use the JAWS cursor to review text. It's just personal preference. VIPMud works out of the box, doesn't require the user to dink around with a ton of extra plugins to get accessibility, and has a clean, simple interface.

As for the price, you pay for convenience I suppose. I bought it to support the developer because I like the product.

@2 true, but you would always hear blank blank blank blank blank blank all the time, which is enough to drive one batty. Way to fix that was to get Sa2NVDA addon, and set your speech to system access.

Honestly, I'd suggest trying out both clients to see what works for you and what doesn't. I get really peeved when people say a piece of software sucks and the software they used is the best. It may be the best for their needs, but someone else might have different needs/wants that their software of choice addresses. I hate having to use the JAWS cursor, someone else may think it's just fine. Doesnt' make us right or wrong, just means we have different views on accessibility.

I think that also depends on how many triggers you have loaded at a given time as well as what file format your sounds are. I had pretty poor results if I was playing sounds in MP3. Sounds in .WAV seem to get handled better. The more triggers you have loaded, the more the client has to process incoming text. That's one reason why classes are useful.

The only thing I saw that I liked about VIP Mud was how easy it was to connect to a Mud. Unless I'm doing it the wrong way, it's hard to connect with Mush Z.

@Ironcross32: You are using the wrong plugin for your output notepad.  Capture Mud Output is a slightly useless (for us) output logger.  When you type cmo, it opens a new notepad window and logs all incoming text past that point into that notepad.  The plugin you are looking for is output functions.  That gives you a notepad window that's there unless you close it, and the control 1 through 10 keystrokes to quickly re-read, copy, or paste the last 10 lines of output, depending on how many times you use the keystroke.
You should never have to use object nav or the jaws cursor with MushClient unless you have to, for some strange reason, look at the actual output window sighted people would use.  this may be because you turned on timestamps and you want to look at when you received a certain message, but if you enable logging, you can just look at the logs instead.

Anyway, a few differences that haven't really been touched on:
Vipmud uses a very limited, proprietary scripting language, whereas MushClient supports Lua, Python, Perl, PHP, VBScript, and a few others.
VIPMud doesn't seem to support regular expressions, although I could be wrong.
MushClient has a built in chat system that interfaces with other people's clients directly.  If you want to talk to other players without having to worry about being watched by admins, you don't have to worry if you're using the chat system.  Sure, you could just talk to people on skype, but the chat system does provide advantages, noteably the power to send commands to other people's clients (very useful when botting.)  Also, the chat feature works with other mud clients like ZMud.

The one thing VipMud has over Mushclient is the way it handles SAPI voices.  If I remember correctly, you can make vipmud speak text through different SAPI voices, so you could have a different sapi voice track and alert you of different things.  I'm sure there is a way to do this with Mush, but it would require scripting.

To sum up, Vipmud is the client for inexperienced computer users that are willing to spend $30 for it, whereas Mushclient is designed for more advanced mudders and/or people who are willing to learn to control a very powerful piece of software.

I personally like Vip simply because of a lot of handy built in features.
First  just to confirm that yes, vip version 2.0  does work with nvda, (I can actually confirm this having just this afternoon installed and played some muds with it and nvda).

What I like in Vip are several things. I agree with Drak about the interface, also I find several fucntions rather easier, like ctrl f to go back and review text or grap the odd word for the input window to type in commands, not to mention keeping characters for different muds. Also as Drack said, when I used MushZ for alteraeon I occasionally found I needed the  curser to check stuff, where in Vip I could get by just with sapi speaking the incoming text (or nvda as it is now), though in fairness to those who make the MushZ addon, I will say need to review text manually massively went down with the various history commands.

As to vip paid status, well to be honest you really don't get anything for paying for it at all, ust the removal of a nag screen and use of msp and the debug module.
The debug module I've never used, and the only games that natively use msp I've ever seen are Materiamagica and six dragons. Actually, due to an install mistake, I used the none paid version of Vipmud for quite some time when I originally got it, and I actually only bought it more to support gma games than because I really felt a pressing need for the features on offer.

I don't know about the scripting end of things, but I do know the packs I've used for Vip like cosmic rage or six dragons have worked well.

In the end I suppose it is a preference thing, which is fair enough, but certainly I've not been unhappy with vipmud myself, indeed it was vipmud that got me to play muds in the first place after no other seemed to support supernova or ms sapi output.

Hello.
I like vipmud but I have a problem.
I have the vipmud 2 and I am in the trial version.
How to get cosmic rage pack to work?
I tried the steps but nothing.
Please help.

dragos, i'm really don't kno, sorry.

but dragos, i m searching to your question's answer.

mushz will have everything you need already. If you play Altar, this is good, if not, its a big pack to download just for those plugins, I'd just go get them all and install manually only the client.

There is a mush pack for CR, but its in a pretty sorry state. I was gonna fix it up when I was playing, but then I sort of stopped playing and now I have no interest in going back.