Chat is the main way you communicate with other players, but some parts of chat in Star Wars Galaxies can be frustrating to new players.

The chat window at the bottom of your SWG game screen is the main way you'll talk with other players.  When you type in the Chat Input Bar and press Enter, your character will say that message to anyone near you. The message will appear in their chat window and in a chat bubble above your character's head.

You can also make copies of your chat window and have different conversations or information in each.  Simply drag a tab off the window to create a new one.  Dragging the tab onto another tab will combine the windows.  Double-click on a tab to bring up a control window for setting channels for that window.

The Chat Input Bar also lets you perform special commands, sometimes known as slash commands because they are always preceded by the /.  For example, if you want your character to wave, type /wave in the Chat Input bar and hit the Enter key.  Type /socials for a for a complete list of all the social commands.  You also can use special speech commands to speak in different ways to those around you.  To use a speech command for a specific message, simply type /[command] followed by your message (for example, /shout Hello!).

Some common speech commands are:

• /say:  The default form of speech. This allows you to say something out loud to anyone around you.
• /tell [player's name] or /t [player's name]:  Sends a message directly to a specific player.  You can use /tell to send messages to any player who is in your galaxy (server), regardless of distance.  You can use it to send a message to a player in another galaxy, if you know the correct server.  So if you are in the Bloodfin galaxy and want to send a /tell to Marsten in Ahazi galaxy, you would enter /tell Ahazi.Marsten [message].
• /reply or /r: Sends a message back to the last person who sent you a /tell.
• /retell or /rt:  Send another /tell to the last person you contacted via /tell.
• /shout or /yell:  Sends your message to a wider area around you.  This is useful for messages like /shout Help!.

When you send a /tell, /reply or /retell, the receiving player will get a beep noise along with the message to get his or her attention.  I like to call this noise the "/tell bell".

Mistells and How to Avoid Them

A mistell is a a /tell—an instant message—sent to the wrong player.  This happens most often when you are typing a /reply to another player's /tell.  For example, if Bill sends you a /tell, and you type /r and start typing a message and Amy sends you a /tell before you press Enter, Amy will get your /reply instead of Bill.

To avoid this, SWG developers added a special chat command that is assigned to the Ctrl-R key combination by default.  When you press Ctrl-R, instead of seeing /reply on the Chat Input Bar, you see /tell [name], where [name] is the first name of the character that sent you the last /tell before you pressed Ctrl-R.  That way, if Bill sends you a /tell and you press Ctrl-R, you'll see /tell Bill followed by a space, ready for you to type your reply to Bill.  No matter how many messages you get before you press Enter to send your reply to Bill, he and only he will get it.