Back in the Swing

There's so much to talk about, in terms of game design and balance.  There appears to be a clear hierarchy of classes and races (the distribution is quite poor), there are lingering issues on overarching mechanics (e.g. endurance as a terrible fighter bonus/money sink, intellect and wisdom being separate attributes), and there are in-game systems that everyone agrees should be addressed (e.g. Christof being overwhelmed, citadels are outdated).

But right now, with a new beginning, I'm going to shy away from controversy and ease back into writing by sharing a short piece of personal information:  I've finally upgraded mud clients.  I'm now on UMC, specifically created to work well with Nodeka, and it really does.  My botchecks are once again captured, which is nice, but mob tells are not, which is baffling (since they are usually more important than the crap that we spew when gabbing with our friends).  I can finally read past character #80 when you send me tells, so yay.

I do have questions, though, and since I'm a newbie, maybe someone can help me out:

1. Is there an equivalent function to #tabadd?  If not, would it be hard to add in this function?  The #tab function was incredibly useful for creating accuracy when dealing with difficult to spell names (Zqxm) and long names (follower_of_). 
2. Does anyone have a second window written up?  I'd love to push output for trials and the info channel (##) onto another window, for at-a-glance status.
3. Is there a way to use variables in #substitute functions?  I'm used to having battle output of "## Grim was just defeated in battle by Grim's gesko!" shortened to "## Grim's gesko killed Grim!".  Right now, everything is backwards and it's making my eyeballs itch.
4. Is there anyway to #highlight?  I've shoved stuff that used to be highlighted into my output window, but that's not exactly what I prefer.

It turned out that most of what I needed to work for me in a tintin environment was translatable to UMC, and the remainder (see above) seems like it should be pretty straightforward.  But I don't really know, since I'm not a programmer of any kind.