luxlunae

I have been playing World of Warcraft for more than five years and I've been using addons since the second day of that. It seems that I am constantly in the flux of adding new addons and updating old addons and tweaking the settings of old addons. I'm afraid my historical method of managing which addons were enabled was a very haphazard "enable anything that doesn't throw a lua error or otherwise annoy me on this toon" and I thought this method was working well enough until I finally got an SSD for my wow installation and I was still getting the same kinds of slow load times that I'd always gotten rather than the lightning that I was promised by all of the braggers on these forums! So yesterday I sat down to come up with a strategy for managing my addons across accounts and cut down on my load times wherever possible.

Now I get the zippy load times I wanted while keeping all the addons that I really need. And using keybinds to switch between sets costs me no more time than it takes to glance at my reference sheet and hold down 4 keys!

First I needed to make a list of what addons I actually have in my addon folder. I started to do this by hand but then I had a better idea. I ran the following simple perl script to create a file that is a list of all of my addons and then pasted that into excel. I use strawberry perl, but this probably works with any installation:

Code:

use warnings;
use strict;
use File::Slurp qw(read_dir);


open(MYOUTFILE, ">AddonList.txt");
my $root = 'F:\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns';
for my $dir (grep { -d "$root/$_" } read_dir($root)) {
    print MYOUTFILE "$dir\n";
}
close MYOUTFILE;

2) I sorted the addons alphabetically in excel and added a column I called "Who uses this?". I deleted all the rows for the Blizzard addon folders. I was left with 145 addon folders (many addons have more than one folder of course so I didn't really have 145 total addons, but it was still quite a few). On my first pass through I was pretty specific in my "who uses" column, for example the addon Archy was "archeologist" and Enchantrix was "Enchanters". Some addons were clearly necessary for everyone (shadowed unit frames, bartender 4) and some were helpful for multiple groups (Skada is important for both solo raiders and multibox leaders). For those I wanted to delete I simply marked them as "remove" and deleted them from the addon folder when I was done. I'm now down to a slim and trim 118 addon folders! I also had quite a number of addons that I only want to be available to toons that specifically ask for them, and called those "Load on Demand". They don't have groups but I don't want to delete them yet.

3) Groups. I decided that the needs of a solo quester, an archaeologist, and a gatherer were all pretty similar, so I grouped those addons, likewise most of my crafters are also AH toons so it made sense to group them together. I eventually culled the addons all down to fitting into either an "everyone" group or one or more of the following five groups: AH/Crafting, Solo Quest/Gather, Multibox Leader, Multibox Slave, or Instance. If you are curious I will append my addon lists with categories to this entry so you can see what I'm using.

4) Addon Control Panel is the addon that I use to handle my other addons. It allows you to manage which addons you have turned on or off while in game (followed by a reload) so that you do not have to log out and in constantly. I think everyone in the world should be running ACP! Even people not playing Wow. It's that awesome. Setting up my groups in acp was quite simple, I typed /acp and a menu will pop up. I then chose to disable all addons, to start from scratch. For this project make sure that "Title" is selected in the dropdown bar rather than "Sort by group". For some reason you can't protect certain addons when you sort by group. Then follow your addon alphabetic list and click the lock icon to protect the addons that you labelled as "everyone". I did this and then saved the set as set 1, and renamed it to "Basic". For the remainder of your groups you simply check off the addons you want to be in that group, and then select the set and choose "save" and then rename. It is important that you understand that you are using the check boxes in this step and not the locks/stars.

5) test your sets by selecting them and clicking the reloadui button. If the correct addons show up for each set you are ready to move on!

6) duplicate your wtf/account/savedvariables/acp.ahk from the account you built your lists on to all the other accounts. If you don't mind installing AutoHotKey, you can do this automatically using the script from my other post.

7) you could stop here, but I've discovered that I really need to make things very easy for myself or they won't become part of my system so I added a keymap to my IsBoxer profile and called it "Addons". You could also do this using the Jamba Macro module. I added five keys to this keymap, four of them were macros set up like this:

ACP AH/Craft
Step 1:
Popup Text > Self "Enabling AH Addons!"
Right Control + Right Shift +Home > Current

Code:

/acp disableall
/acp addset set 2
/reload

The correct number for the set in the macro can be counted from the top of the list on your ACP sets list, starting with 0. (For me 0 was the "basic" set which I want separate but don't actually want an isboxer key for).

The fifth key was a meta key that called the ACP Master key on the current toon and the ACP slave key on all other toons.

I've found that now that I took the time to set up these groups I'm not only experiencing much faster load times, but I'm completely comfortable running with a reduced complement of addons knowing that the functionality I need is just a keybind away and I won't have to hunt through the menu to turn things back on or off.