So, I want to overhaul my UI, because the current UI is *very* busy (as can be seen in the ICC-25 videos. From looking at the different UI packs on Curse.com, it looks like you start with a basic look and feel, and then add/adjust other elements.

My original user interface (UI)



This is basically the original default World of Warcraft UI, layered over with close to a dozen different add-ons. These are, in no particular order:

Capping Battleground Timers
Necrosis LdC
Omen Threat Meter
Quartz
Recount
VuhDo

Backup your WTF folder!

Before you do anything, go make a copy of your WTF folder, which contains all your settings. On Windows XP, this is located at "C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\WTF".

You should really be making backup copies of this daily, and keeping multiple versions so that you can restore it when things go pear shaped.

General Look and Feel

Sunn - Viewport Art - This one looks very interesting. It allows you to shrink the area used to render the 3D world and has some very nice textures. There are at least a dozen different Sunn art packs and you can easily change them out.

Looks like the hard part of using Sunn is going to be setting the top/bottom and left/right panels to the proper width. Initially, you may wish to use a solid color instead of the art (or start with "Royal" which is fairly tame). Here's what it looks like once you have installed with the basic defaults. Even with the default UI, you can start to see the promised land down the road.



To configure Sunn, you type "/sa". The global options are pretty good, but I had to turn on the "Vertical Viewport" check-box in order to keep the same view width. If you use the left/right panels, I suggest also turning on the "Horizontal Viewport" check-box as well.

You'll probably end up with a 1cm strip across the top of the screen and a 5-10cm strip across the bottom. Plus possibly a 2-5cm strip on both sides.

Note: You cannot currently shrink the top panel in Sunn, best you can do is set it to 0.74 or something.

Button Bars

This is what I suggest tackling next. Getting your button bars (or action bars) changed over from the default UI is going to be the biggest change. You're going to want to peruse the Curse action bar category for general ideas. There are a few hundred in that category, but not everything is suitable as a total replacement. Don't forget to look over at WoWAce as well.

I suggest that you start by sorting on "updated" in a descending order to see which add-ons are still being developed. The two popular ones seem to be:

Bartender4 (and dual-spec support)
Dominos

Opinion is divided on which one will float your boat. Most people say to start with Dominos and move to Bartender if the first doesn't meet your needs.

After installing Dominos, and before configuring (via "/dom"), your screen is going to look like this:



So, first things first. I strongly suggest that you pay attention to which bars are used by default in the World of Warcraft UI, then stick with using those as your primary bars. This way, when things break and you have to disable Dominos (or Bartender), you won't be completely lost. Use the alternate button bars for things that won't matter as much if you don't have access to them easily.

Under the Dominos profiles configuration, save your current profile to "Default" and then switch to it. Delete whatever it created. You'll usually want to do as much work as possible in a default profile, then switch to a class-specific or character-specific profile later.

In the main Dominos configuration (/dom), turn on "show empty buttons". This will make things easier for you to see. Then click on "Configure Bars...". You're going to see a lot of empty rectangles show up. The primary (5) bars that the default WoW UI gives you are "1" (bottom bar in lower-left, with up/down arrows to switch to other bars), "6" (top bar in lower-left), "5" (lower-right above main menu icons and bag icons), "4" (left bar of the two vertical bars on the right), and "5" (right bar of the two vertical bars on the right).

Before moving bars around, you should right-click on all (10) bars and change the "scale". Since the usual goal of an UI redesign is to save space, I recommend using a scale of 0.75 (75), 0.80 (80) or 0.90 (90). I went with 80% in my setup, which lets me stack four bars high without losing too much vertical screen space.

If you want a (6) total bar setup, I suggest stacking in the following pattern:

1 7
5 6
3 4

If you want (8) total bars, you might try:

1 8
5 7
3 6
2 4

Alternately for (8) bars:

4 8
1 7
5 6
3 2

Right now, I don't use bars 9 and 10. So middle-click on them to hide/show them from view entirely. If you have turned on the "show empty buttons" option, it will be more obvious whether the bars are visible or hidden.

If you use Quartz for your cast bars, you should probably hide the "Cast" bar in Dominos.

The "Class" bar is the "stance" bar for classes like druids, warriors, deathknights, etc. And probably auras for Paladins.

The big "roll" window is where loot rolls will appear. There's also an XP bar which defaults towards the top of the screen. I generally lay that across the very bottom of the screen, with an opacity of only 25% unless I mouse-over the bar.

You're going to have to spend a fair amount of time trying out different layouts, trying out different situations, different classes, and testing vehicles.

Moving the Tooltip and Minimap Windows

I suspect this will be the next one that bugs you, along with the character window in the upper-left and the mini-map in the upper right.

ToolTipAnchor
MoveTooltip (alternate link)
TooltipOnMouse
Tipsy

wMmap (skip this one per notes at bottom)
Chinchilla Minimap
Xone MiniMap
SexyMap
gMinimap

Personally, I'm starting with wMmap and Tipsy (use "/tipsy" in-game). Note that wMmap will *not* remember what "shape" you pick for the minimap. So try a few different ones out, then go looking in the "wMmap.lua" file for a line that says:

wmshape = "gold"

(Which is right at the top of the LUA file and easily edited. I prefer the "gold" look, so that's what I have mine set to.)

Update: Gave up on wMmap due to issues of getting the server time wrong and it didn't give me access to the calendar (even with middle-mouse click).

Going to try out "Minimap Button Frame" and stay with the default minimap for the moment.

Moving the Character Portrait, Target and Focus

A lot of this can possibly be handled by FluidFrames. You will have to map keys in order to actual move various frames (I used shift-mouse-wheel-up and shift-mouse-wheel-down). Some things can't easily be moved with Fluid Frames - so make a backup copy of your WTF ("SavedVariables\FluidFrames.lua" and "layout-local.txt") files.

Otherwise you may have to try XPerl or Pitbull.

Backup your WTF folder!

Go backup your WTF folder again. Please?

Copying to other characters

After you get one character setup, you can copy things from one WTF folder to another. Note that FluidFrames saves it's changes to "layout-local.txt" in the base folder and not to a LUA file under SavedVariables for that particular character.

I generally make a quick backup of all files in the character's WTF folder, then copy everything changed in the past day from my master character into all the other characters' folders.

Note that Dominos will not appear to work after doing the LUA copy, you will need to go into the Dominos configuration (/dom) and select your default profile, then save the profile out to a class name (i.e. "Mage").

Most everything else only needs very minor changes to function properly or to slip into the proper positions.

Semi-final product



Updates

Sep 6 2010 - Gave up on wMmap as it was getting the server time wrong and the mouse middle-click to open the calendar isn't working.

Sep 6 2010 - Take a look at "QuestMover", which lets you move the quest tracker area away from the screen edge (needed for those of us that put buttons down the right edge).