bar-mods
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Addon Spotlight: QBar
Every weekend, Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here. It just occurred to me that I've been really focusing on bar mods in the last few Spotlights (Dominos and AutoBar, specifically). To complete a trio, today I'm going to do it again with QBar. QBar is a simple mod, with a simple goal. Its reason for being is to show you any clickable quest items that may show up in your inventory, on a movable bar. It has the following functionality: Positionable anywhere on your screen Scalable Can show/hide tooltips for its buttons Can expand horizontally or vertically Can ignore particular items if desired You can bind a key to the last used quest item. This is my favorite feature; just one click and then alt-Q (or whatever binding you set) does it from there.
Addon Spotlight: AutoBar
Last time on Addon Spotlight, we looked at Dominos, my current favorite bar mod for all my spells and abilities. Of course, like any good raider, I also have bar spots for my various consumables: bandages, potions, elixirs, buff food, and so forth. But it's a pain to manually reconfigure all that every time I get a new item. Fortunately, I don't have to: AutoBar does it for me, and means I never have to hunt in my bags for a scroll or a quest item. In short, AutoBar adds one or more bars to your screen, each full of buttons for various categories. For instance, the default "main" bar has slots for: Hearthstone (and related abilities, like Death Gate or Scroll of Recall) Health potions Mana potions Buff foods Mage foods Elixirs (battle and guardian) Mounts Tradeskills Quest items Trinkets And probably some more things that I'm not remembering right now. AB shows the most recent item you've clicked for each category (in some cases) or the best item (in others), and other options in the category appear on mouse-over.
Addon Spotlight: Dominos
Many people who don't otherwise use mods much use a bar mod, since Blizzard's default bars are quite limited. Back in the day it was Flexbar or Trinity; nowadays it's usually Bartender or Dominos (but oh, how I miss Flexbar). Dominos is the successor to Bongos, so if you used Bongos in the BC era, you'll probably be at home here, although it's missing a few features that the author found troublesome and not worth it. It's also the bar mod I use on all my characters (along with Autobar, which I'll discuss in a future Spotlight). The goal of Dominos is to be simple to configure, yet powerful enough for most situations. It also uses the default action bars, so any bars you have set up already in Blizz's interface will port over fairly seamlessly, and things like tooltips work just fine. It also works just fine with vehicles, which are prominently featured in many Wrath quests. Most of the options are hidden away in the bars' individual configuration frames, which are accessible by right-clicking a bar while in config mode (/dom config). A bar can be made as many buttons as you want it, they can go horizontally and vertically, any size you want - all the options you'd expect from a modern bar mod.
