[GUIDE] Bartender 4 - Basic Setup

[y02mustang]

I created a quick guide tonight for Bartender4, since I ran across a couple of questions here on the forums and I couldn't find a wiki link or anything on their download page at Curse, so I thought maybe one might be in order. I haven't thoroughly proofread it yet, and it's 1:00 AM and I just finished a couple hours of Magmaw attempts, so I'm kinda tired, but if there are any glaring errors I'll edit them tomorrow.

I hope this helps someone. I also created a more advanced guide, which I'll try to post, too.

BARTENDER 4
SETUP GUIDE

Table of Contents:
1. Intro (#INTRO)
2. Before You Get Started: Profile (#PROFILE)
3. Basic Bar Intro (#BAR)
4. Basic Bar Movements (#MOVE)
5. Basic Bar Sizing (#SIZE)
6. Visbility (#VISI)
7. Keybindings (#KB)

Use the search function on this page and enter the “#PHRASE” term to skip to a certain location in this guide.


#INTRO

Hello! This is Rayve, and I'm going to go over the basic initial setup options for Bartender 4 (BT4). This guide will help you arrange your bars how you want them, allow you to see them when you want and hide them when you don't, and go over the basics of keybinding with Bartender. I have an addition to this guide for changing bars in stances/forms, if that's what you're looking for.

For the initial setup, I'm going to be using my baby Warlock, Shego.

When you first download Bartender 4 (you can find it at Curse.com) you might not see much difference in your screen the next time you log on to WoW [when I first downloaded BT4 a long time ago, my bars all moved to the center of my screen and freaked me out, but I haven't noticed that on new toons recently so maybe an update fixed this. If this happens to you, don't panic – type /bt4 and uncheck “Lock” as described below and you'll be able to move everything around].

You didn't download BT4 just to keep your same old layout, though, right? Of course not. So, type /bartender or /bt4 or click on the Bartender minimap icon to bring up the options and let's see what we can mess with.



This is the first window you should see when you bring up the options menu.

Here, you can uncheck “lock” to unlock the bars and enable you to move them around on your screen.

“Button lock” is just what it sounds like – check this option to keep spells from flying off your bar during a mad bout of clicking when that mob is eating your face. You'll want to leave it unchecked, however, until you have everything sorted how you want it, so, for now, let's leave this one as it is.

“Minimap icon” does just what it says, shows or hides the minimap icon. Checked means you have it around your minimap, unchecked means you'll need to use one of the slash commands to bring up this menu - /bt4 or /bartender work fine.

On the left is a list of all the bars you can fiddle with, 1-10, as well as your bag bar, micro menu (your systems menu, with character portrait and quest log buttons, for example), a pet bar (useful for Hunters, Warlocks, and any quests where you may adopt control of a pet), stance bar (if necessary for your class), vehicle bar (for when you jump in a vehicle), reputation bar, blizzard art bar (the shiny gryphons on the side of your action bars, as well as the textured background) and an xp bar.

Presets is good if you want to try out some, well, preset options. This will void any changes you've made before, so mess around with them at the start if you'd like, but for this guide, we're gonna do it all by hand.

Profiles allows you to make different profiles for different characters/realms, and you can also copy one profile to another character. Once you get a BT4 setup the way you like, sometimes on new characters it is easier just to Copy that profile over and tweak it a little rather than rebuilding from scratch.

And FAQ is, well, the FAQ.

On the right portion of the window, you'll see a few more options. I generally leave the Blizzard Vehicle UI checked, and I also add a Focus modifier and enable that, because I like focus-casting. These options are fairly self-explanatory, so check and uncheck as you see fit for your play style.


#PROFILE

Before you get started, be sure you go to the main option window and click on the “Profiles” option. Type in a name for your profile (the name of your toon, or the class, or whatever floats your boat) and be sure you save it. Don't save over the default, it's best to create a new profile. Any changes you make from here out will be saved to this created profile so you won't lose changes. Also, if you create a new one instead of just using default, you can change stuff all around on a toon and reset to default if you don't like it, or you can get a new toon and then go to “Profile” and “Copy” a profile you like.



#BARS

We'll go over each of the bars in detail, but first, I want you to click on “Blizzard Art Bar” and uncheck the “Enabled” box.

This should make your layout look like this (well, minus the Warlock spells I've already put on my bars, but you get the idea):



No more gryphons!

#MOVE

But this still isn't exactly what I'd like... so let's unlock the bars now and start moving things around.

When you uncheck the “Lock” option at the top, all of your bars will change transparency, turn green, and have a label on them so you know which bar corresponds to what option in the BT4 menu.



You'll also see a small secondary BT4 option window pop up, telling you your bars are unlocked. You can close the main BT4 window if you need room on your screen to see and move things around. Your bars will remain unlocked and moveable until you click the “Lock” button in the secondary window.

“Bar Snapping” helps you line up bars with one another, sort of like snapping them against an imaginary grid. You can turn this off if you wish, but I normally leave it on, because I don't find that it gets in my way.

So as you can see, all of the bars I can interact with via BT4 are green and labeled. I usually like to move my Bag and Micro bars off to the side, throw my pet bar to the left, so let me drag some bars around and we'll see where we're at.



You can see now that I've merely shifted around some positions.

#SIZE

Hm, I don't really like having Bars 3 and 4 vertical like that... Bar 4 seems to be buffs and things I don't need in combat, so I'm going to click on Bar 4 in BT4's menu and change it.

Moving the Scale to .6 and the Rows to 3, I can make it a 3x4 (because I keep 12 buttons) box and quite a bit smaller than the normal icons. I also move it out of the way, so the Bar 4 option window looks like this now:



While my layout (close up of Bar 4 for you) looks like this:



You can tell here how much smaller the icons are compared to the normal Soul Burn icon in Bar 1 to the left.

Looking at the options, you can see what sort of things you can play with for each bar – the Alpha setting will change the transparency level, Scale changes the size, Padding will change the amount of space between each icon in the bar, and Buttons will change the number of slots in the bar. Rows, as you can tell with my Bar 4, changes the number of rows – you can have a 2x6, a 3x4, a 4x3, or a 6x2 box (and of course the 1x12 horizontal and 12x1 vertical bars). I leave Padding and Buttons alone, but you can, of course, change whatever you'd like. All of these changes are visible while the bars are unlocked, so feel free to change the sliders. Changing the Buttons option while you have spells in the bar, however, may result in those spells disappearing from the bar depending on their location in the bar and the amount you decrease, so you'll have to remember to go into your spellbook and put them in a new spot.

Now, feel free to move and resize any of your bars. You can enable extra ones, disable ones you don't need, and so on.

A few more notes of my personal choices: I disable the Reputation and XP bars simply because I have another addon for them, but you may keep them if you wish. I also choose to add the Keyring to my one-bag Bag bar. I generally scale everything down, so I feel like I have even more screen real estate available. You can, of course, scale bars larger or smaller as needed.

If you feel like you need to switch spells around once you've got bars moved and such, go ahead and hit “Lock”, which will lock the bars but allow you to move your icons. You can always uncheck the “Lock” box again to move your bars around at any time.

Go on, I'll wait...


Good? Nicely done.

Here is how my layout looks now, to give you an idea (unlocked so you can see the bar labels):



#VISI

So, now that we have bars in the right locations and sized how we want them, let's do a small preview of the Visibility option you may have seen on every bar.

For a good example, let's take a look at the Pet Bar. Click on “Pet Bar” on the left, and then click on the Visibility tab to the right. You'll see that the Pet bar should be hidden while in a vehicle, on a vehicle (mount), or without a pet. This is just as we'd expect, since our pet disappears at any of those times. And, in the screenshot, you can tell that since I've mounted, my pet (and his pet bar) have disappeared from my screen.



You can see how these options can be used. Have a bar you don't need when you're in combat (say a bar full of profession links or something)? Choose to “Hide in Combat” and free up some space on the screen while you fight.

If you notice the Stance/Form options just below the main Visibility boxes, you'll see there isn't much to do – I'm a Warlock, I don't really have stances or forms (this may change for a Warlock who has Metamorphosis available, my lock isn't high enough to test this). My Druid, however, can provide lots of examples on the Stance usage, and does so in the next part of this guide.

#KB

For now, however, I want to give a quick note about keybindings in Bartender.

If you look at the screencap above, you'll see a small CH in the box where my Soulstone icon is located. This corresponds to the keybinding (in this case, Ctrl+H) I have chosen for this button in Bartender – notice I said button, not spell. Bartender allows you to keybind each button of every bar with a specific keystroke or mouseclick (or combination thereof), but it is not actually attached to your spell.

See the following three close-up screenshots -



Though you can't see it on this screencap, I am holding and dragging the Soulstone spell, which is why you can see the other boxes highlighted, and you can also see how there are already keybindings even though they are empty and don't hold a spell.



And here you can see that I've switched my Soulstone and Healthstone icons and now Healthstone has the CH keybinding.



Keep in mind then that you are binding the buttons (or boxes) and not the spell which may be in there.

To edit your keybindings in Bartender (which will overwrite any keybindings you may have in WoW – for example, you can bind one of the Bartender buttons to X, and it will do so, but it will also automatically unbind “Sit” from your X key) just click on the “Keybindings” button at the top of the Bartender window.

You will see this box (at the top of your screen, I drug it down for a condensed screenshot):



I always check the “Character Specific Key Bindings” option because I like making different keybindings for each toon. But I might be alone in this, so you can leave it disabled (as is default) and then if you decide to “Copy” your BT4 profile on another toon, you just have to fill in spells/macros/icons for each keybinding, which will already be there and in the same spot, just waiting for something to do.

When you hover over a button, you will see instructions on how to bind a key to that slot:



Here we can see that CH does indeed stand for Ctrl+H (green text = keybinding commands), and that this is known by BT4 as Button55. Pressing ESC while hovering over this slot would remove the Ctrl-H and any other binding on this slot [note this removes ALL keybindings from the button]. Pressing any other key, mousebutton, or combination thereof would add another binding to the button. Yes, you can have multiple bindings to one button.

If you were so inclined, you could do this (must be a pretty important button to have 5 keybindings!):



Now, if you do enter a binding that is already in use, Bartender will give you a nice warning – telling you it has indeed performed your request and bound the button to your key(s) of choice, but it also tells you that it had to unbind something else to do so. It will look like this:



At the top of the screen there you can see the information given by BT4, and at the bottom you see that Button17 indeed has X as a keybinding now. This warning/information will show whether you are re-using a Blizzard keybinding (such as X), or one you already had bound in BT4 previously, in which case it would say “Unbound <key> from BT4Button<number>”.

As a tip, because you are binding keys to buttons and not to spells directly, when you change specs, you may find that spells have different keybindings unless you move them to same slot in both specs. For example, on my Hunter, I have Disengage in the same spot so “A” is always Disengage. This is all personal preference, of course, but I imagine it's easier to keep all your spells in the same button location so you have the same keybindings across specs whenever possible.




Well, I hope this gave you a good start for your own Bartender setup. If you have any questions, please let me know, and I will do my best to answer. Any corrections are also greatly appreciated!

If you'd like more information on paging, visibility, and state configuration options, stay tuned for the next part of this guide!

[bladz01]

Is there a way to make the vehicle specific binds different from the Bar 1 binds? I prefer to use 1,2,3 etc with vehicles while I use different binds for all pf my other bars. Thanks!

[Bullerick]

Good guide. I have a question - You mentioned the character portrait is able to be moved, but by the looks of things, it's actually not. Is it because it's not as straightforward as everything else?

[FAILoZOFF]

Good guide. I have a question - You mentioned the character portrait is able to be moved, but by the looks of things, it's actually not. Is it because it's not as straightforward as everything else?

its part of "micro menu", it opens your character panel
not the actual "player unit frame"

[ComputerNerd]

its part of "micro menu", it opens your character panel
not the actual "player unit frame"

Then perhaps consider describing it differently, since in terms of unitframes portrait means exactly that, the 3d or 2d model of the target of the unitframe.
Perhaps Character Summary or Overview.
While it is technically a portrait on the button, it is just something that happens rather than something most people, if any would actually use for any sort of aesthetic purpose due to the size.

[FAILoZOFF]

Then perhaps consider describing it differently, since in terms of unitframes portrait means exactly that, the 3d or 2d model of the target of the unitframe.
Perhaps Character Summary or Overview.
While it is technically a portrait on the button, it is just something that happens rather than something most people, if any would actually use for any sort of aesthetic purpose due to the size.

huh? i was just replying to Bullerick

[MannDuo]

Then perhaps consider describing it differently

I don't think the guy that posted the guide nearly 5 and a half years ago is coming back just to change it slightly...

[ComputerNerd]

huh? i was just replying to Bullerick

Quoted wrong post, sorry.

I don't think the guy that posted the guide nearly 5 and a half years ago is coming back just to change it slightly...

Yeah, good point.
I didn't see the date, ironic considering I often point that out to other people.