Prat 3.0

I the latest version of Prat, there is a new module "Search". This was actually a suggestion from a guildie of mine, and a pretty good one I think. The new module allows you to search your chatframes for text you are interested in finding. The ... [More] 2 new commands are /find and /findall /find <text> will search backwards through the chat history to find the text you asked for (case sensitive!) /findall <text> will print of a list of all lines which contain the text you asked for (again case sensitive) If you aren't a Prat user, chatframe searching is still available via this standalone addon Happy New Year's and Happy Searching! [Less]

There are many quality fonts out there, but when dealing with chat, one has to be a little choosy. If you are in the EU, you have to be even more choosy since not every font will support your local character set. With that in mind, we'll do a ... [More] quick run-through of Prat's font module and go over some of the options. Let start by looking at the options panel As you can see I have chosen the font DorisPP. This font *looks* like a monospace font, but it really isn't, so there may be occasional small alignment issues with the text. Here's a sample of trade chat: Prat comes with a variety of extra fonts to improve the look of your chat. If you look at the list of fonts, you will see some which have a "(U)" at the end. This means that the font is Unicode, and has the additional characters for most EU languages, including Russian. Now remember I was saying that DorisPP was not really monospace. Lets try a real monospace font and see what it looks like Notice all that ugly extra space around the channel name? We need to get rid of that. There are in fact 2 spaces we need to get rid of, the space following the timestamp, and the space following the channel name. Here's a quick look at our goal To get rid of these spaces we need to adjust options in the Timestamps and ChannelNames modules. Both options are called "Show Spaces", and we want to disable the space by unchecking the box. As a final reminder - if you want Prat to restore your font settings at startup, you need to check the "Remember Font" box. [Less]

I am looking for a guild to host myself and a friend for cataclysm. I am currently on Mal'Ganis but am willing to move to any Central or East Coast server. Due to the time demands of work and addon writing, I am looking for a casual guild but one ... [More] that is still active and fun. Ideally I'd like a high pop guild just because there would be more people to do things with. I play a resto druid, and my friend plays a holy priest/prot pally. We have both been on a long break from WoW (i skipped ICC entirely) but are interested in starting to play again. If you are interested in hosting us...drop me a note on how to apply. I look forward to hearing from you. [Less]

This article is for more advanced users. Be forewarned. Recently I was asked how you get your own name colored specially in the chat. Well Prat does not have a special module for this. This is considered a "Custom Job". Well for this type of thing ... [More] we have a special module "CustomFilters". Lets start with the example of coloring our own name, and playing a sound when it appears in the chat. We want to hilight our name add some brackets, and play a sound. So our name would look like: ">>> Sylvaann <<<", be green, and play a bell. First create an inbound filter, this type of filter filters text as it comes in from the server. We want to catch both "Sylvaann" and "sylvaann". To do this we set our filter to "([Ss]ylvaann)". Now this syntax is the Lua pattern matching syntax. I'll give you a link at the end of this artcle. Now that we have our pattern, we want to set up the responses. So first the replacement text ">>> %1 <<<", the %1 means put what we found in the () of the match at the %1. So that gets us ">>> Sylvaann <<<". Now, to finsh up, we check the box that says "Hilight match text", we select a hilight color, then finally we pick a sound from the "Play Sound" dropdown. Here's a screenshot of all that set up:   Now here is the result:     Now that we did something simple. Here is an idea for something more complicated. Check out my trade chat. Notice the text between the <> and (). See how its a different color.     The following 2 filters will make that happen for you: Here a link to the Lua pattern matching syntax.   [Less]

The enhancements I'm going to show today are all located in the HighCPU addon. So first off, lets enable it. Now, we are going to explore a few features in the Playernames module. Color Names Everywhere does what you might think. ... [More] Instead of just coloring the player links according to class, it colors names it finds in the messages themselves. Now, occasionally you will have a name you don't want colored. For those names there is the /pratblacklist <name> command. Beyond coloring, we have some other options available to us. Showing the raid icon along with the player name Adding invite links, so that when someone says "invite" you can just click on the link. Similar to invite links is alt-invite. With alt invite you just hold down the alt key and click the name of the player you want to invite. Now that we have explored the Playernames module a bit, we'll look at Prat's newest feature: Scrollback.     Scrollback allows your chatframes to remember your conversations. By default it records the last 50 messages on each frame. You can see what happens when we use the /reload command That's all for this entry, I hope you have found at least one new feature to try. [Less]

If you like to live on the bleeding edge, and you dont mind dropping me a note or opening a ticket - I'm in need of some more alpha and beta testers. You dont have to do anything special, just run the latest alpha version of Prat, and report any errors you run accross. Thanks in again for all your support!

Prat's most recent addition the bubbles module provides some fun new features to customize the behavior and appearance of the chat bubbles. The bubbles module is part of the addon Prat-3.0_HighCPUUsageModules, so to use it you will need to enable ... [More] that addon. With the Bubbles module you can: 1) Change the Font of the bubbles to match the font of the chatframe, and size the font however you like 2) Change the outline of the chat bubbles to match the type of chat 3) Enable Prat's hilighting of chat text, including "color names everywhere" and CustomFilters. 4) Enable display of raid icons 5) Enable dynamic compression of the chat bubbles so they only display 1 line of text (unless you mouse over them) Not a Prat user? There's also a standalone version. Here are some screenshots to give you an idea of what you can do:     [Less]

One super annoying thing that goes on on my current server is trade chat spam. People will post the same message sometime 10-15 times in a row. Have a look: Well, Prat has a solution for that. Locate the module "Filtering", and engage the ... [More] option "Throttle Spam". This gives you a basic solution to your spam throttling needs. Prat's solution tries very hard to conserve memory and CPU resources while still filtering out alot of the repeat message spam. Have a look now: Much better. Now that we have dealt with the trade spamming, we turn to something more personal. Whenever someone says your name in chat, you would like to know, wouldn't you? I know I do. Prat has a module to help with just this need, its called PopupMessage. Go ahead and enable it. Now lets have a look at its options: Popupmessage watches *chatframes*. In our case we have 2 chatframes named "General" and "Server". Since only "General" is checked, only messages which appear on the "General" tab will cause an alert. Let's test the alert. To do this we can't just say our own name, because Prat will filter that out. So, here is what I do to test: And here is what happens when someone says my name: [Less]

Hidden on the module control page is a little-known Prat module named 'Alias' This module will allow you to create your own slash commands. So, first things first, enable the 'Alias' module. Now you are ready to create your own slash command ... [More] , we'll start with a very simple example. /alias /hello /say hello The alias module will let you know you have created a new command, and will hilight the important bits. Now lets test our command: /hello You can alias any command that Blizzard has not made secure, so /target won't work and neither will macros. Alias becomes especially useful when used with the Substitutions module. So for this next example, go to module control and enable the 'Substitutions' module. Substitutions provides a host of % strings, very similar to %t which Blizzard uses as the name of the target. Substitutions has its own target variable: "%tn" Now, lets use this variable in our slash command. /alias /hi /w %tn hi Now target yourself, and lets try out our command: /hi You can check out the other substitutions on Prat's options panel:   [Less]

Lets start with something simple yet very important. The editbox. At its most basic, the editbox lets you enter text and commands. Seems easy right? Well. There is one catch. In order to allow you to move around while you type, Blizzard's ... [More] default UI requires you to hold down the ALT key to move the cursor around in the editbox. This is one thing that alot of chat mods change for you. They remove the need to hold down the ALT key to move the cursor around. This has the side effect of not allowing you to move your character while you are typing in the editbox. Which one do you like? Its a personal preference. With Prat, you get to choose. Here is a screenshot of the options screen showing you the option you need to adjust.   If you would like the behavior of the default UI, check the box. If you would like to be able to scroll the editbox using just the arrow keys, uncheck it. Prat has a lot of options, explore them, you might find something you never knew you needed! [Less]