Popups by s|n

Hi and welcome to my mIRC popups tutorial. This tutorial is designed to teach newbies how to manage those lovely popups that we all seem to get addicted to in the early days. Some skills such as colors and (beginner) aliases should be known for this tutorial.

What ARE popups?

mIRC allows you to create custom menus for its windows. To create these you must know how to use basic IRC commands, how to create Aliases, and how to use Identifiers and Variables.

If you click the right mouse-button in a window, the popup menu for that window will appear and you can select menu-items which you have defined to perform certain tasks, such as opping a user or joining a channel.

Allow me to define where each popups section is located in mIRC...

Status: These popups are used in the (main) Status Window

Channel: These popups are used in the #Channel Windows

Query/Chat: These popups are used in private windows with other irc users

Nickname list: These popups are used in the list of nicknames in a channel

Menubar: And finally, these are used in the menubar, found after the DCC options menu and
                    before the Window menu, the defaut menu name for these popups is Commands

Cool, so how do I get to the goods? :)

First you must access the Popup Menus Editor. Its icon is located at the top of the screen, , then click the Popups tab.
Or, you could press Alt+P. Inside the mIRC Editor, the Popups tab should be selected. If you look below the tabs you will see a line that says 'Editing: Menu Bar' or something of that sort. This shows you what section of mIRC's popups you are editing. To select a different set of popups, click on the View menu and select which section you wish to edit.

Okay, now that I know where they are.. whats next?
Here is a sample popups menu for the "Nicklist" popups:

User Control
.Op:mode # +o $$1
.-
.DeOp:mode # -o $$1

This adds a menu to the nicklist popups (the box where all the nicknames are) that allows you op and deop a user.

Wow, whats all this !@#$% gibberish?
The $$1 represents the *selected* nickname, if you have more than one nick selected, you would use $2, $3 and so forth.. Also, contrary to popular belief, you can NOT use the $nick identafier in the Nickname list popups. The hash mark (#) stands for the #Channel window that is active (on top)

User Control
This creates a Menu called 'User Control' and it will appear when you right click on someone's nickname in the nicklist box.

.Op:mode # +o $$1 Okay, the period (.) indicates that 'Op' is a sub menu of the 'User Control' menu (note that it is located right below 'User Control' and is preceeded by a period.) The colon (:) divides the menu text from the actual command that is performed when you click the menu. In this case, When you click Op, the script will give Ops to the person selected.

.- The hypen (-) adds a seperator between the above and below commands in the menu. In this case, 'Op' and 'DeOp'

.DeOp:mode # -o $$1 This line adds a 'DeOp' command to the menu, in which case would deop the selected nick.

In a bit more detail...
You can also have sub-menus of sub-menus, simply preceed each new menu with one more period than the menu above it. Look at this example for "Channels" popups:

Colorful Text
.Blues
..Blue on White:msg # 12,0 $+ $$?="enter what you want to say:"
..Blue on Black:msg # 12,1 $+ $$?="enter what you want to say:"

This would make a menu called 'Colorful Text' when you right click in the channel window with a 'Blues' sub-menu and within that menu, you could select which colors of text you would like to speak with.

Multiple commands can be executed from a popup, simply seperate each command with a pipe (|) ... For example:

Say hi:msg # hi! | msg # how is everyone?

Another way to write popups is using the brackets { }
If you wanted to write the above menu in a different way you could do it like this:

Say hi: {
   msg # hi!
   msg # how is everyone?
}

You can also write *aliases* to shorten the task...
Here is yet another way to do the same popup:

First, write an alias to say hi and place it in *aliases*

hi { msg # hi! | msg # how is everyone? }

Then, add the alias in a popup:

Say hi:hi

Simple, eh?

Now I will explain how to use Remote Popups...

If you arent familiar with scripts or the remote section of mIRC, dont worry about this part yet, you wont need it anyway.

Okay, to add menus to mIRC from scripts, use this syntax:

menu <menu name> {
Menu1
.Menu1a:command1 | command2
.Menu1b:command3
}

Got that? Good.

Now here are the items you can use for <menu name>:
status, channel, query, nicklist, menubar, @custom window

You can also have one popups section in more than one menu, for example:

 menu channel,status {
Server:echo $server
}

This would add a menu to both the status window and the channel windows that would echo the server you're on when you click it.

For more information on popups, consult my *advanced* popups tutorial.

Thats all for now, if you have any questions, comments, or have something I should add to this tip, please email me at sin@mirc.net Thanks!