A text command, beginning with a "/". Generally found in MMORPGs, where they are entered into the chatbox and the "/" is used to distinguish them from ordinary chat.
Slash commands allow a wide variety of operations, not limited by what can be keymapped. Speaking of, slash commands can generally be included in keymappable macros; in fact, the command to make a macro can be a slash command.
Many slash commands are chat commands, especially emote commands. They are also frequently used for pet, group and guild commands.
The use of a slash to indicate a special command is inherited from Internet Relay Chat. Some games, in fact, use a customized version of IRC for their chat windows, justifying the use of slash commands.
A variant is exclamation mark commands, which are sent to others like ordinary messages, but interpreted as commands by bots.
Not what a person uses to get their favorite characters to hook up.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Video Game Examples
- Battle for Wesnoth is one of the least clunky pieces of open source software, but text commands (entered through the colon) are still the only interface for shuffling people around in multiplayer games.
- City of Heroes uses an obvious IRC descendant for its chat window.
- In EverQuest and EverQuest II, "/who all bard 30 40" lists all of the Bard player characters between level 30 and level 40 who are currently online on the server.
- /Pizza will also take you to the pizza hut website to order a 'za online.
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas can be patched to play online. Most servers have hundreds of commands, and every one is different, so switching is always an exercise in frustration.
- Everybody Edits has several commands, for world management, chat, and reporting rule-breaking. Later updates would make commands somewhat unnecessary, as command functions would be available as more user-friendly GUI in the user list and level settings menu.
- Minecraft has plenty, with widely varying capabilities
. For single-player, they are enabled by default in creative mode, enabled or disabled at world creation in survival mode, and force-disabled in hardcore. Servers have them enabled for all gamemodes, and server plugins can take them Up to Eleven with commands that remove all entities, spawn things like spheres, or make new worlds.
- NetHack has a number of these, including naming items, dipping items in liquids, rubbing items, invoking items, and accessing containers which are lying on the ground. They're accessed through the pound sign ('#') rather than the slash key.
- Quake II, and later games under the quake engine, use these too. With Quake III, some bots will react to the player saying a command without the preceding slash.
- The original Team Fortress (a mod for Quake) used slash commands to perform certain actions such as deploying a turret. This became annoying for new players, as they had to find a large number of keys to "bind" to each command, and had to edit configuration files and go through other contortions to get the changes to stick. Many early FPS mods—even into the Half-Life era—suffered similar problems.
- Server-side mods for Team Fortress 2, like SourceMod, when installed and enabled on a server, also allow the player to do specific actions by typing slash commands on the chatbox, like /rtd or /rtv.
- Because of this, TF2's Medieval Mode auto-parser ignores text beginning with '!' or '/' (so SourceMod commands aren't modified).
- Slash commands are still common ways to interact with an FPS's command console on the PC. Some engines make the slash optional; some engines automatically broadcast anything typed in the console without a slash. Differentiating between these engines is an exercise in frustration.
- World of Warcraft has a great many of these.
- The players also like to mock these in the chat channels. For example. Party A makes a comment against Party B, intended to be disparaging, insulting, riling, or otherwise offensive. Party B writes /wrists, which implies that he slits his wrists. But it's usually done sarcastically.
- One joke video said that a secret cheat was /enable Rickroll.
- One of their annual April Fools' Day jokes had Blizzard claiming that they were instituting a /panda command which, like Everquest's /pizza command, would let you order Panda Express delivery. Except rather than taking you to PE's website, it would summon a little in-game panda avatar who would take your order.
- In the Unreal Tournament series of games everything typed in the console, which doubles as the text chat, is treated as a command. Only lines which start with a chat ("say", "teamsay") command are then broadcasted. Also, Every function in the game engine has a corresponding command, pressing any key has the effect of typing a console command without showing it in the console.
Non-Video Game Examples
- Several text-based chat rooms use slash commands to action posts, choose font colors, and create new public or private rooms.
- Destroy the Godmodder supposedly takes place in Minecraft, and so newbies are prone to using these.
- It makes for a great way to tell who hasn't read the rules though. It never works and only people who skip the opening rules can't figure it out.
