This is what the Pirch Help stuff says about aliases:

Aliases are simply custom commands or macros that you can define for PIRCH. To create aliases, select the Alias option from the main menu. This Alias definition window will be displayed. In order to make use of aliases you must of course already be familiar with IRC and basic IRC commands.

Ok? Did you get that? Now you know how to do aliases. I guess I don't have to write anymore about them!

Well, I guess there are a few things I could tell you about aliases, that wasn't covered in the Help section, like maybe I could explain them to you in English.

For those of you familar with text editors like Word Perfect, or MS Word, you probably know what a macro is, but there are some people who don't, so lemme tell you what a macro is:

A macro is a shortcut!

That's all it is. It's like programing your keyboard to carry out a set of commands when you press a key, or a combination of keys.
When you do certain things over and over again, it's just easier to press one or two keys, then go through the whole process.

Aliases are just macros in your Pirch. It's a way to program pirch to do a certain thing just by typing a few words, you can also use the function keys (like F2) as aliases.

The Alias editor is divided into 3 parts:

The alias list on the left side that has the names of all the aliases

The editor pane on the right side where you enter the alias commands

The control panel on the bottom that has several buttons that allow you to save changes, load alias files etc.

How to make (add) an alias

Pirch32bit and Pirch16bit have slightly different ways of entering aliases,
Here's an example on how I would make an aliases for 32bit:

I want to make an aliases to tell people where I live. I'm going to call the alias, live.
I would first click on the aliases button, then click on add, when you click on the add you get another box you can either:

1.Type in live, and hit ok.

2.You will see the word live in the alias list on the left side.

3.Click on the word live, and in the editor pane on the right side you would type in the string for the alias live.

OR

You can click on add, and type in live, then type or paste in the string for the alias live.

Either way works, it's just important to make sure there is a space after the name of the alias, and the actual string for the alias if your doing it the second way.

So if you were looking at the aliases screen, you would see live on the left and /me lives in Connecticut on the right screen.

For 16bit it's a bit different
You need to add a colon after the name of the alias, so when you click on the add button, you would:

1. Type in live:

2. Click OK

3. Click on live on the left side, and type or paste your string on the right side.

MOST IMPORTANT! You must ALWAYS click on SAVE after you've added an alias.

If you don't you will lose everything you just did!

Now to execute this alias, (make it run) you would just type in the typing area of the chat screen:
/live
And this will pop up on the chat screen:

Bubbett lives in Connecticut

To assign function keys to aliases, you would click on add, then type in the name of the function key, the name of the function key would be the name of the alias, like F2, that is the name of your alias. Then you would add the string as normal.

To run the alias, you would just hit the F2 key.

For the 16bit, same thing except you add the colon, click on add, type in F2: click OK, then add your string.

There are ways to use the alt, ctrl and shift keys to use with the function keys, but I don't wanna get into that now!

There are certain function keys that windows use's, so I wouldn't use these keys as aliases functions:

Ctrl-F4 - Closes the active window
Alt-F4 - Closes the application
F1 - Help (this really isnt a windows reserved function key, but is it is sort of a standard)

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I know you are probably wondering what the heck I'm talking about, but as you read on, you will begin to understand. (I hope!)

Now about these string things! Pirch is like any computer program, it need commands to make things run. You can either copy stuff from other people, or you can make your own stuff. You need to learn how Pirch reads certain variables (words), and uses them to do stuff. A string is just a bunch of commands that tell pirch what to do.


I've made a list of the variables, yup another cheat sheet! You can get ithere.

They really don't make to much sense to they? Well as you go along you will pick up the basic meaning of each variable and how to use them, really you will!

The /me variable is used quite a bit, it's just a nice easy way to say stuff you would repeat over and over again.

Just follow theHow to make an alias, to add some of your own aliases.

Here's a few examples of the most common aliases:

You have kids, you wanna tell people about them.

Make an alias, call it kids, the string would look like this:

/me has two kids, Heather is 8 and Peter is 4.

You would of course add your own kids names and whatever else you wanna say about them! Unless you happen to have a kid named Heather and Peter who happen to be the same ages!

I'm in chat, someone says, "Gee, bubbett, how many kids ya got?"

I just type:
/kids

Up on the chat screen pops:
bubbett has two kids, Heather is 8 and Peter is 4.

Let's say you want to tell people what time it is in your part of the country, you would make an alias, call it time, and the string would look like this:

/me says: It's $time in Connecticut

Which would come up as:

bubbett says: It's 2:11 PM in Connecticut

The $time variable will read whatever time it is on your computer

You can get really fancy, and put up a string like this:

/me says: It's $time EST in Connecticut, on $day $date

Which would show on the chat screen as:

bubbett says: It's 2:14:21 PM EST in Connecticut, on Saturday 3/8/97

Pirch will of course read the day, time, and date from your computer.

You getting an idea how this works now?

Ok, light blue is not the only color pirch can use. There are ummmm...like 15 different colors you can use to make your text look however you want it to look.

Here's that color chart again! These color are not exactly what it looks like in Pirch, but you get the idea, of course I can't do White, you wouldn't be able to see it, use your imagination.

0-White	1-Black	2-Navy	3-Green	4-Red	5-Maroon	6-Purple
7-Olive	8-Yellow	10-Teal	12-Blue	13-Fuchsia	14-Gray	15-Silver

Most people use a white background for their chat screen, so the colors that look good up there in the color chart, will look good on the chat screen, like yellow and white (doh!) would be very hard to read on the chat screen.

Now, to add these colors to your aliases, instead of using /me you would just do this:

Take this time alias we did above:
/me says: It's $time in Connecticut

Go to the part where it says /me, erase the /me part and put this instead,

ctrl k 12, well you wouldn't type that in, you would hold down the Control key and press K, then put in the number of the color you want to use, it would look something like this in your alias:

|12 It's $time in Connecticut

When you use it on the chat screen it would look like this:

<bubbett> It's 2:55:46 PM in Connecticut

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