There are a couple of cool things you can do with hotkey messages. You can put various symbols in them to make them more distinctive, and you can put in fake links. You can even put in a real link if it suits you.
The trick is that you have to manually edit one of your EverQuest files. The one you need is “CharacterName_ServerName.ini”. For me, that’s “ToonName_Seventh.ini”. You will find the file in your EverQuest directory.
To add in symbols, you need the Character Map utility that comes with Windows, or something similar.
Step 1 - Either find the name you have given to a Social hotkey you want to edit, or make a new one in game.
Step 2 – Using a text editor like Notepad, open up the Ini file for your character.
Step 3 – Scroll down until you find the specific hotkey you want to edit. You’ll find it under the heading: [Socials], and it will be three lines that look something like this for each hotkey:
Page2Button1Name=Pull
Page2Button1Color=0
Page2Button1Line1=/g ♪♫ >> %t << does not like my music. The sentence is death ♫♪
4 – Using the Character Map utility paste in the symbols you want.
5 – Once you have the text looking the way you want, use the File menu and select “Save As”. Save the file under the name it already had, but make sure that in the drop-down box that is for Encoding it says: “UTF-8”. That’s the format EQ reads.
Putting in a fake link involves pretty much the same technique. You have to edit the Ini file. In this case, what you do is relace the “%t” in your hotkey with a string of code that EQ will read as a link.
Find the social hotkey text you want to change, and paste over the “%t” with this:
0028071-00001-00001-00001-00001-000015ED87FFC %t
(copy it directly from this post and paste it in.)
Note the little box symbols in front and behind the link text. Those are required. Also, you must have text right before and right after those boxes. It can be anything. I use square brackets myself.
So my hotkey ends up looking like this:
Page2Button1Name=Pull
Page2Button1Color=0
Page2Button1Line1=/g ♪♫ [0028071-00001-00001-00001-00001-000015ED87FFC %t] does not like my music. The sentence is death ♫♪
It is possible to use a real link instead of a fake, if you wish. The trick here is to get hold of the raw code EQ uses for the link. I've been told a couple ways to get this information.
One is to send a tell to an item link. In a chat window, type in ";t" and then link the item you are wanting the code for. So it ends up looking like:
;t [Sword of Ownage]
When you send that, you will get an error message. "Cannot find player" followed by the raw link code. Copy that down, or have chat logging working and get it from your log.
The other way is to have the EQIM program installed. Start up a conversation with a friend, and have them link things. You will get the raw code in the EQIM message window
