Addon Spotlight: Prat (and PitBull_Prat)

The basic chat interface in WoW is pretty limited. It's easy to miss what's happening in the chat window while fighting, for example, and there are many other ways in which the chat windows are not very user-friendly. Prat helps solve a lot of these usability problems, and since it's modular, you can turn its features on or off easily. New functions are being added over time, too. Here are a few of the things it can do:

• Enable mouse scrolling in the chat window.
• Abbreviate the channel names (from [Guild] to [G], or just the green color, for example)
• Add keybindings for various chat channels.
• Add a slash command (or keybinding) to whisper to your current target.
  
• Add timestamps to the frame (so that you know when someone sent a message).
• Color player names according to their class, and add their level beside their names.
• Toggle the chat buttons on or off, or move them about.
• Turn on chat logging.
• Move the chat input box (the Editbox) to a different location.
• Copy text from the chat frame.
• Shorten existing commands to your own personal alias comands. (eg: "/say "Get ready, I'm pulling now!" could be shortened to "/pull". This is like a macro, except that it is executed with your own shortened command instead of a button to click on, which is handy for things you say or do often, while out of combat.)

As for that problem many of us have, where, in the thick of battle, someone will say something like, "WAIT! DON'T PULL!" or "Help me! I'm being attacked!" and you miss it because you were looking at the fight, not at the chat window: a recently developed addon, blandly named "PitBull_Prat", helps solve this problem by working in conjunction with PitBull and Prat together, by adding the text of what you and others say to a colored speech bubble right next to that player's unit frame in your interface (as you can see in the screenshot above). Since you're more likely to be looking at your friends' health bars to keep aware of how the battle is going, hopefully this will help you to see what their saying in time to help them too. Click here to download Prat and PitBull_Prat from files.wowace.com, and remember, PitBull_Prat will only work if you have both PitBull and Prat installed.

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