What is an Alias?
It is an automated way to do things inside a chat program (in this instance)
You may have used the word-processing programs called Microsoft Word or Word Perfect. These use things called Macros to speed up things you do frequently.
An Alias is really nothing more than a macro.
All Windoze computer programs have one alias set up as a default. F1 (Function-key 1) is ALWAYS "Help".
While you may find that other people can give you macros you can use in your chat program, they are very easy to do yourself, particularly if you have a well known chat program such as mIRC.
We have a link at the bottom of the page to a text file you can download, and maybe copy lines from it into a mIRC alias.ini or alias.mrc file.
However, as with all code, it is better if you do it yourself, because then you will know exactly what happens when you press a button.
To add alias commands, you only need how to use a simple text editor like notepad.
mIRC comes with its own editor.
You hit Alt-A and a window pops up in which you can add alias commands, edit them, or remove them. mIRC comes with some aliases already set up - for example you can type /j #fred and it interprets that as /join #fred
Suppose you wanted to join a channel with a much longer name of "#I-don't-believe-it's-true" ? Well you could set up an alias of a single key such as Function Key 8 to do that...
you would enter a new line into your alias file after hitting Alt-A which reads...
Many people in many chatrooms on IRC use a dedicated key - or several of them - to post things to channel quite regularly. I log into the channels service bot on undernet using F2 for example
The help files in your chat program probably have a lot of information in them that most people don't ever read.
If you are an op in our channel - or any other - you might want to consider using the alias idea for logging into the bot. While it is dangerous to actually script your password into an alias, you can use a special piece of code to open a dialogue box into which you can type your password, and there is another piece of code which takes whatever your nick happens to be and uses it in an "op me" command !
For example, to log into logos3 you could set up a 2-key stroke like this...
You could then set another up like this...
Messaged commands are easily done too, setting another up like this...
Aliases
/F8 /join #I-don't-believe-it's-true
/lp /msg logos3 pass $?="password"
and logos would recognise that as being you once you had typed /lp and your password
/lc /chat logos3
This would cause a dcc chat request be sent to logos after you typed /lc, and you could then set up another like
/op .op $me
...
which would cause logos to op you (whatever your nick happens to be) when you typed /op in the bot's chat window
/lo /msg logos3 op #
Having typed /lo, the bot would op you, because your chat program would translate the code # as meaning "in the channel in whose window this alias was sent"