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Overview

Slash commands in World of Warcraft are executed in the chat box that can trigger lots of things for a character as well as for their UI.

Examples of slash commands:

  • /m opens the macro window
  • /dance puts the character to dance
  • /logout logs the character off

There are lots of native commands, and addons can introduce their own.

Stormwind Library commands​

It's very easy to add new slash commands to the game and you can do that with a couple of code lines.

The Stormwind Library offers a small structure to add commands in a more OOP approach, which means you can wrap a command in a Lua class in case its complex enough to be handled by a procedural script.

That said, if an addon needs to use the library commands resources, it must adhere to a few rules. Otherwise, the addon can "manually" introduce commands in the traditional way and bypass this resource.

  1. Single command name: the library allows only a single command per addon. Which means the addon can't register /myAddonCommand and /myAddonAnotherCommand, instead, it must use the concept of command operations.
  2. One callback per operation: considering a single command per addon, the first argument is considered the operation, which means something like the real command inside the addon. As an example /myAddonCommand show and /myAddonCommand hide are commands with two different operations: show and hide.
    • Still, a command callback may accept arguments, so a command like /myAddonCommand show simpleUi darkMode will call the show callback passing simpleUi and darkMode as arguments.

If the addon can handle commands in the proposed way, then it can use the resources below to register, listen and trigger callbacks for slash commands.

Current limitations​

The current command structure has a few limitations that developers need to be aware. These limitations can be covered in the future depending on their demand and more clarity on how this structure is being used:

  1. Commands must have an operation: a command can't be created without the operation, meaning that /myAddonCommand with no arguments won't have any effects and won't forward to the addon callbacks.
    • For cases where the addon needs only one single command, prefer to use a default operation representing what the command opens or runs, examples:
      • /myAddonCommand show
      • /myAddonCommand config
      • /myAddonCommand start
    • By default, calling /myAddonCommand will trigger the help operation as better explained here.
  2. Arguments can't escape quotes yet: when calling commands handled by the Stormwind Library, arguments are separated by a space ( ) meaning that /myAddonCommand operation arg1 arg2 will call the operation passing both arguments as two Lua variables and it also allows wrapping strings with spaces in "" or ''. However, until the current version, it's not possible to escape quotes in a way that the argument can't contain those characters.