ZenChannelColours

Eighteen channels, all the same off-pink, in an order the client reshuffles every time you log in.

You can fix that by hand. You can fix it again next week when an addon or a community pushes everything down a slot. If Blizzard doesn't just randomly wipe it, itself.

Or you can install this.

Order that holds

General, Trade, Services and the rest pinned where you put them. Community channels gathered together. Addon comms channels sunk to the bottom where they belong, out of the way of anything you actually read.

Sort once, save it, and it survives logins, reloads, and every channel that joins or leaves afterwards. Or leave the auto-sort on and let it keep the arrangement without being asked.

A palette that sorts the frame before you read a word of it

The colours are not decorative. They run warm at the top for the things that interrupt you, through green for the people you chose to stand with, blue for the group you are working with, and grey for the machinery. Whispers glow. Addon traffic recedes. Your eye finds the important line before your brain parses it.

One hue per source, thirty-odd sources, authored rather than generated.

Eight themes, and yours

• WoW Default, for when you want Blizzard's own back.
• Immersive, Blizzard's own with creature and boss speech in the player's tones, so an NPC reads like somebody talking.
• Pastel, where saturation carries hierarchy and brightness stays high.
• High Contrast, full saturation and maximum hue separation. More insistence.
• Night Shift, blue suppressed and everything warmed, for the sessions that run past four in the morning.
• Instance, six sources instead of thirty, so the whole wheel is spent on the six that matter in a pull.
• Monochrome and Accent, everything neutral with two accents. Brutal and effective.
• Low Stimulus, hue variance near zero. Four things keep their colour, and they are the four you cannot afford to miss. For migraines and for bad light. It has its own keybind and a four keystroke command, because the nights you need it are the nights you do not want to go looking through a settings panel.

Save what you have built as a theme of your own. A warmth slider sits over whichever theme is in force, so any of them can be pushed toward firelight without a ninth table existing.

Colours for the channels you joined

Your guild's community, your roleplay group, three private channels and the one somebody made for a raid night. Nothing ships a colour for those.

A sequence is a rule rather than a list: a path through hue that yields as many distinct colours as you have channels, so the eleventh is not the same gold as the ninth. Fourteen of them:

Zen, Pride, Warms, Cools, Greens, Celestials, Pastels, Candy, Ember, Ocean, Twilight, Mono, Alliance and Horde.

Dealt once and then kept by name, so a channel keeps its colour when another joins above it. A new channel takes the next colour rather than shuffling everybody else. And a colour you set by hand is yours: the sequence deals around it and never takes it back.

Getting started

Install it. The order sorts itself and the palette paints.

• /zcc theme lists the themes, /zcc theme night shift applies one.
• /zcc sequence lists the sequences, /zcc sequence ocean deals it.
• /zcc low for Low Stimulus, in seven keystrokes.
• /zcc save holds the order you have arranged, /zcc reset hands it back to the auto-sort.
• /zcc colour #YourChannel A0D8EF for one channel, set by hand, kept forever.

The minimap button carries all of it, and every theme and sequence is one click away.

Built for Midnight, Interface 120100. Part of the Zen suite, alongside ZenChat for channel profiles and line formatting, SpeakinSpell for automated roleplay speech, and much more.

All of my addons are made by hand. I like not de-skilling.

Bug reports and requests welcome. Bring the error text.