Alias Basic

Not everyone knows what aliases are, so a brief overview. Aliases are a lot like macros. They contain a list of commands, they have a name, and using them runs the list of commands.

There are a few key differences though. Aliases are stored in a text file (alias.txt) in your SWG folder. You can just edit this file to make new aliases. You can also create a new file and load the aliases from it. However aliases must list all the commands on one line, and they can not be bound to hotkeys or toolbar buttons.

Defining an Alias

There are two ways to define aliases. The in-game way, and the out of game way. First the in-game way.

The /alias command lets you define a new alias. For example, if you wanted to have an alias to join a group then say hi to everyone in group chat, you could do the following.

The out of game way would be to edit the file “aliases.txt” in your Star Wars Galaxies? folder. The file contains a list of alias names followed by the command list. For example, to define the above alias...

If you open up alias.txt after having used /alias, you will notice the command is already in there. Once you've made a change, if you are in the game you will need to re-load the aliases..

You don't have to use alias.txt to define new aliases. You can put it in any text file, then just /load that file.

In game, you can use the /alias command to list what aliases are defined. You can use the /unalias command to remove an alias. And you can use /save similar to /load to save the aliases to a text file.

Using aliases

Once you have an alias defined, you use it like any command. For example, using the above alias again as an example, when you get a group invite, you type out the alias name.

Since it is used like any command, you should take care that the name isn't similar to any existing commands. For example if the alias were named grouphi instead of higroup, /g as an abbreviation of /gsay wouldn't work anymore.

Aliases as Partial Commands

An alias does not need to be a complete command. You can define an alias as part of a command, then type out the rest of the command with the alias. This is useful for aliasing chat channel names. If you joined a chat channel named peoplewholiketypingalot you could save some typing.

Pronoun substitution for use with aliases

The following paramets can be used to automatically insert words and names according to what/who you have targetted.
Note that the variables are case-sensitive so use caps for them, e.g. %NT.

For example instead of manually typing:

You could target them and run an alias with text as follows to produce the same effect.

Alias Files

Aliases are saved in a file “aliases.txt” normally. When you define an alias in-game with /alias or remove one with /unalias, the file gets saved. You can create any text file you want and put aliases in it, or use /save to save your current game aliases to a new file.

Be careful though. When you use /load, if you redefine an alias, the file you loaded last gets saved to with all the aliases defined. If you want to avoid this “polution” you could do something like the following.

This will result in any alias changes saved to “notaliases.txt”. This is useful if you redefine aliases a lot but don't want to keep the changes. If you do want to keep changes, use aliases.txt instead of notaliases.txt, just know that the aliases you just loaded are then saved to aliases.txt.