DarkStar Frequently Asked Questions
$Id: FAQ.txt,v 1.17 2009/03/13 23:25:22 brian Exp $

This is a work in progress and is in no particular order. It will be
updated as questions come up. Eventually, I will write a better, more
organized version. For now, this will have to do.


Q: Why does everything go to the first window instead of the current window?

A: By default, EPIC sets the first window's level to ALL causing everything
   that doesn't specifically belong to another window to be sent there.

   What you want to do is set the first window's level to NONE from one
   of the RC files, preferrably ~/.epicrc. Try adding the following line.

   window 1 level none

   There is an example of this in the sample.epicrc file.

--

Q: How can I make DarkStar load the modules I want on startup without
   asking me first?

A: First you may want to edit the list of modules that will be loaded
   automatically. You can do this by typing '/DSET AUTO_LOAD_MODULES'.
   When this is to your liking, type the following commands.

   /DSET LOAD_PROMPT OFF
   /SAVE

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Q: What should I do when upgrading to new versions of DarkStar?

A: This depends heavily on the amount of customization you do. If you have
   your own modules, themes, statbars, etc. then you need to be more
   concerned with changes to what I distribute. In this situation I strongly
   urge that you review the UPDATES file for details on what's new.

--

Q: My status bar is displaying letters with accents instead of straight lines.
   How can I fix this?

A: You need a font that displays these upper ASCII characters correctly.
   Any of the vga fonts should work. I have two of the vga fonts available
   at http://www.got.net/~brian/fonts/ and http://www.epicsol.org/~brian/.
   You can probably find others with a quick search on google.

   If you're using a font that you know works and you still can't get the
   lines to display correctly, you can try entering the following command
   at the EPIC input prompt.

     /EVAL XECHO -r $chr(27)\(U

   If this works for you, you can place this command in ~/.epicrc so that
   it executes on startup.

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Q: How can I set a default status bar?

A: The status bar is chosen by your theme. If you want to change the status
   bar that your theme uses, I would recommend creating a new theme based
   on your current theme which uses the different statbar. This way you won't
   lose your changes during upgrades. To save a custom theme, simply edit
   the desired format variables with /FSET and when you're finished type
   "/THEME -save <name>" where <name> is the name of your theme. If no
   name is specified a default of "custom" will be used.

--

Q: How can I get publics to show '@' and '+' before the nicks of users who
   are oped/voiced?

A: This can be accomplished by adding a small piece of code to the
   PUBLIC* (and optionally SEND_PUBLIC*) format variables wherever you
   want the '@' or '+' to be displayed.

   ${ischanop($1 $2) ? [@] : ischanvoice($1 $2) > 0 ? [+] : [ ]}
     or
   ${ischanop($1 $2) ? [@] : ischanvoice($1 $2) > 0 ? [+] : []}

   e.g.
   *** Current value of PUBLIC is <$1> $3-
   /FSET PUBLIC <${ischanop($1 $2) ? [@] : ischanvoice($1 $2) > 0 ? [+] : [ ]}$1> $3-

   If you do this, you will probably want to create your own custom theme
   for it so that any changes you make are not overwritten the next time
   you update DarkStar.

--

Q: How can I add a timestamp to output?

A: There are currently two ways to add a timestamp to output. The easiest,
   which adds a timestamp to every line, is to do the following.

   /SET OUTPUT_REWRITE [$Z] $1-

   If you want to add a timestamp only to specific output, you should
   add $ts() to any /FSET variables that you want to be timestamped and
   then type /DSET TIMESTAMP ON. Again, it may be good to create a custom
   theme after modifying your formats.

--

Q: How can I save my /SET variables? The /SAVE command doesn't seem to
   save these settings.

A: I have tried to keep the DarkStar stuff pretty separate from EPIC itself
   so these settings are not saved with the /SAVE command. The best way
   to retain the values of /SET variables is to set them in one of your
   rc files, either ~/.epicrc or ~/.dsrc


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