Action Bar Button Growth Direction

Summary

Reverse button growth direction (top/bottom, right/left) of any multi-row/column action bar.

What it does

With Dragonflight, Blizz changed the button growth direction for multi-row action bars. Formerly, it was ‘top to bottom’ (downwards), now it is ‘bottom to top’ (upwards).

I don’t know why they did this. For most action bars, this is not overly tragic, as you can adjust your spell mapping/keybinds accordingly. However, it can be a real problem with Action Bar 1, which is used as the override and vehicle UI bar, resulting in the “wrong” keybinds in the vehicle UI.

This addon allows you to reverse the button growth direction.

So if you were tempted to use a ‘biggy’ addon like Dominos or Bartender just to get the button growth direction fixed, you might want to give this one a try. It has no impact on your client performance, it does its stuff only at login, then nothing.

By default, only the Y-axis button growth direction of Action Bar 1 is reversed (from ‘bottom to top’ to ‘top to bottom’); everything else remains unchanged.

If you’re having trouble reading this description on CurseForge, you might want to try switching to the Repo Page. You’ll find the exact same text there, but it’s much easier to read and free from CurseForge’s rendering errors.

A bit more in-depth

Let’s say you have an action bar with horizontal orientation like this:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 Q W

If you converted this bar to a 3-row bar before Dragonflight, you got ‘top to bottom’:

1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8
9 0 Q W

Since Dragonflight, you get ‘bottom to top’:

9 0 Q W
5 6 7 8
1 2 3 4

That’s where the addon comes into play: it can revert the growth direction to the one before Dragonflight (‘top to bottom’).

For the sake of completeness, I also added the ability to reverse the growth direction on the X-axis (horizontal), but since Blizz hasn’t screwed that up (it’s still ‘left to right’), I don’t think there’s much use for it, and the X-axis is completely untouched by default. But who knows, maybe they have ambitious plans to screw that up in the future.

Setup

The addon has no user interface at all, not even slash commands. However, all settings are exposed to a database in the SavedVariables file, which means you can edit them there and they will be preserved across future addon updates.

I hope you can live with that, but adding a config UI for something that you will change once in your WoW lifetime – if at all – is way too much overhead for my taste.

If you only want to reverse the Y (vertical) growth direction on Action Bar 1 (MainActionBar), which is the bar where the wrong growth direction causes key mis-mapping issues on the VehicleUI bar, then the default settings are fine for you.

Changing settings

The SavedVariables file is at …/World of Warcraft/_retail_/WTF/Account/<your account number>/SavedVariables/ActionBarButtonGrowthDirection.lua.

Use a text editor to edit the file (for example, BBEdit, CotEditor, Notepad++, …), do not use a word processor or Rich Text editor like Pages or MS Word. To edit and save the file in-place, you don’t have to quit WoW but you have to be logged out. Otherwise the client will overwrite your changes at next logout/reload.

It’s pretty straightforward:

In the SavedVariables file, you’ll see…

One big Lua table with all action bars per Y- and one per X-axis (the ["x"] and ["y"] tables).
- The order of the entries inside corresponds to the action bars by index (so the first entry is Action Bar 1, the 6th one is Action Bar 6, and so on; see the little table at the end of this readme).
- An action bar set to false will be left unchanged; if set to true, the button growth direction will be reversed on the respective axis.
A small ["enable"] table with 2 entries, ["x"] and ["y"]. This is a quick way to set the behavior for all bars per axis, and it can overwrite any setting in the big per-bar tables. You can set it to:
- "none": No bar will be reversed for the respective axis. Per-bar settings are ignored.
- "all": All bars will be reversed for the respective axis. Per-bar settings are ignored.
- "some": The per-bar settings from the big table for this axis will be used.

The defaults are:

X-axis is completely unmodified (the ["x"] inside the ["enable"] table is "none").
On the Y-axis, Action Bar 1 is reversed (first entry in the big ["y"] table is true), the rest is unchanged.
["y"] inside the ["enable"] table is "some", so that the true for Action Bar 1 is used..

So, if you want to reverse all bars on the Y-axis, just set the ["y"] in the ["enable"] table to "all" instead of "some" (no need to set each bar individually to true in the ["y"] table).

Index to bar mapping, as of 12.0.1:

[ABBGD table index]: [Frame] = [“name in the game GUI”]

1: MainActionBar       = “Action Bar 1”
2: MultiBarBottomLeft  = “Action Bar 2”
3: MultiBarBottomRight = “Action Bar 3”
4: MultiBarRight       = “Action Bar 4”
5: MultiBarLeft        = “Action Bar 5”
6: MultiBar5           = “Action Bar 6”
7: MultiBar6           = “Action Bar 7”
8: MultiBar7           = “Action Bar 8”

Feel free to share your suggestions or report issues on the GitHub Issues page of the repository.
Please avoid posting suggestions or issues in the comments on Curseforge.

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