Tuesday, April 3, 2012

How to Macro Any Addon Button

Certain parts of gold making can be very monotonous, particularly activities like milling, prospecting, disenchanting, or buying out large amounts of items from the auction house.

The in-game abilities are easy enough to macro but some folks seem to stop there. Well, did you know it's just as easy to macro clicking buttons, such as clicking TSM's buyout button or Panda's disenchant button?  Let me show you how.

Essentially the macro command is very simple.
/click [Name of Button]

Not too tough! But I use this really super obscure addon and there's no one out there that will tell me what the button is called!  That's fine, you don't need anyone to do it.  You can figure it out yourself very easily and the best part is that everything you need is built into the base game.

First open your macro frame. You can do this by hitting Escape => Macros or typing /macro into your chat frame. Now here comes the fun stuff.  What we need to use is the built in framestack command.  Type /fstack into your chat window.



That will bring up a window that looks like this:


This window will display information about anything you mouse over. Below you can see what pops up if I mouse over my character pane with Shadowed Unit Frames.


So what does this have to do with making button macros? Using this tool you can learn the name of any button from any addon in the game. If you move your mouse over a button from an addon you will see that button's name displayed in the pop up.

Here's what happens when I mouse over TSM's buyout button:



Using this information you can then make a macro to click any addon button. Here are some examples of macros I've used:

This macro will click the buyout button in TradeSkillMaster and will accept the confirmation window.
/click TSMAHTabBuyoutButton
/click TSMAHConfirmationActionButton


This macro will disenchant the first item in Panda's disenchant section.
/click PandaDEFrame1


This macro will click the automatic disenchant prompt from Enchantrix.
/click AutoDEPromptYes


Hopefully that will help you guys get a handle on some activities that were just boring as could be before. Good luck!

8 comments:

  1. Awesome tip faid, I will definitely be using this with panda to do the over 9000 disenchants I do while shuffling. Now I can just mash a button on my keyboard and watch a episode of family Guy in the background without worrying about where my mouse is lol.

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  2. Excellent tutorial. Thanks for making this.

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  3. mmm, let me guess. You just made an post on how easy it is to circumvent the new REALLY annoying Anti-Botting crap in TSM in hopes they'll remove it soon :)

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    1. What anti-botting stuff? I haven't run into it. But for what its worth if it's a thing that pops up that asks you to type in a random string of numbers to prove your humanity there's two points to make:

      1) This can't type anything for you.
      2) That "new" development has been in TSM for a very long time.

      If it's something other than the random string of numbers I haven't seen it. In fact, I thought even the previous anti-botting thing was removed since I haven't had anything of the sort in the release version.

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    2. randomly and infrequently you used to have type a numeric code to continue posting in the old TSM, have yet to run across it in the new version...and I'm all for less botting

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  4. Oh the new TSM doesn't have that stupid crap? Maybe I'll download it then.

    I don't bot but nor do I like having one handed hen-peck at numbers randomly when I'm trying to do my morning routine (usually a hair dryer in the other hand)

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  5. The new anti-botting mechanism in TSM had it randomly moving the AH window in a circle every few minutes. I don't know whether it's been removed again since I don't recall seeing it the last few days, but it was very annoying when it was there, and I'm not sure exactly what it was supposed to prevent.

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    Replies
    1. It was a 1st of April joke along with 999999 gold sale

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