Macros & socials¶

The EQ client keeps your macros — the socials on your hotkey buttons — per character, in the same <Name>_<Server>.ini files that hold the friends list. Your main's carefully built macro set is invisible to your alt, and there is no way to hand it to a guildmate.

The Macro Editor makes that set editable, copyable between your own characters, and shareable as a file.

What you can do¶

Set your EQ install directory in Settings → General.
Open Macro Editor from the tray, pick a server and character, and hit Load.
Edit any macro's name, colour, and up to five command lines.
Copy to character(s)… replicates the set onto your alts.
Export… writes a macro pack; Import… merges someone else's.

Edit while logged out

The client rewrites the whole character .ini when you camp or log out, discarding anything changed while it was running. nParse+ warns you if it sees the game running, but it will not stop you — so the safe habit is to edit macros while that character is logged out. If a save looks like it "didn't work", this is almost always why.

Originals are copied into a socials_backup/ folder beside them before the first write, the same safety net the friends sync uses.

Duplicates and conflicts are different things¶

Users conflate these, so the editor keeps them apart:

	Same slot	Different slot
Same macro	nothing to do	duplicate — skipped, and reported
Different macro	conflict — you are asked what to do	placed

A duplicate is a macro the character already has somewhere, matched on its name or on an identical set of command lines. Imports skip these and tell you where the existing copy lives; you can place another copy anyway.

A conflict is a different macro already sitting in the slot an imported macro wants. Imports keep their original page and button so muscle memory survives, so when the slot is taken you get a choice:

Choice	What happens
Overwrite	The imported macro takes the slot.
Move to free slot	It lands on the first empty button instead.
Skip	It is not imported.

Find duplicates… lists every duplicate group in the current character and jumps to any slot. It never changes anything — clear a slot yourself if you want it gone.

Where your macros came from¶

Every slot carries a badge saying who last wrote it:

Badge	Meaning
▢	From game — read out of the client's file, not authored here
✎	Created in nParse+ — you edited it in the Macro Editor
↧	Imported — it arrived in a macro pack or a copy from another character

The Show filter dims the slots that don't match, rather than hiding them, so positions stay readable. Export… uses the same information: it defaults to only what I authored, so a pack you share doesn't carry the client's stock macros.

\"Last written by\", not \"authored by\"

nParse+ knows whether a slot still holds exactly what it wrote there. It cannot tell who changed it otherwise. Edit a macro in game and it correctly flips back to from game — but edit it in game back to the exact value nParse+ wrote and it will still read as yours.

The local copy¶

Each time you Load a character, nParse+ mirrors their macros into its own data directory. The client's .ini stays the source of truth; the mirror exists so the editor can tell what changed since last time, track the badges above, and put things back.

The Local library tab lists that mirror. Its most useful job is after a clobber: if the client rewrote the file and dropped macros, they show as not in file, and Restore from local copy puts them back into the working set (you still click Save to character to write them).

The mirror is a convenience, never a dependency. If it can't be written the editor says so in the status line and saves your macros anyway, and deleting the directory is a supported reset — everything simply reads as from game again.

Keeping it current automatically¶

By default the mirror only updates when you open the Macro Editor and hit Load, so macros you make in game go unnoticed until then. Turn on Sync macros when EQ exits in Settings → Advanced and nParse+ folds those changes in on its own each time the client closes — new macros get recorded, and anything the client dropped becomes restorable without you having to have noticed.

It waits for the client to exit rather than polling, so it never reads the files while the game holds them, and a character whose file hasn't changed costs nothing. Sync now on the same page runs it on demand.

This is read-only: it reads your EQ directory and writes only nParse+'s own copy. It will not write macros back into the game on its own — that stays a deliberate click, because an overlay quietly rewriting your character files is not a thing you should have to think about.

Autocomplete¶

The command lines in the editor autocomplete as you type:

/ at the start of a line suggests client commands — /assist, /pet attack, /shout, /outputfile inventory, and so on. Multi-word commands keep matching as you go, so /pet at still finds /pet attack.
% anywhere in a line suggests the substitution tokens the client expands when the macro runs: %T (your target), %N (your own name), %S, %G, %R, %C, %Z.

The suggestion list is curated and deliberately conservative — commands that only exist on Live are left out, since offering something P99 rejects is worse than offering nothing. It is only ever a suggestion: nothing validates your macro against it, so commands from custom UIs or a future patch work exactly as they always did.

Exports are plain JSON with a format of nparseplus-socials, the same envelope shape as trigger packs, so they can be posted, mailed, or checked into a guild repo. A pack records which character it came from for display only; that never changes anything on import.

Only socials are covered. Hotbar assignments and key bindings live in other sections of the same file and are not touched.