ShortNames

Forever gives every character a surname. That is good for the world and hard on a chat frame: every name is twice as wide, five names fill a line, and after an hour you stop reading them at all.

ShortNames rewrites what chat displays, and nothing else.

What it does

Bare /sn toggles between off and whichever mode you last chose. The setting is remembered.

What it deliberately does not do

Clicking a name still whispers the right character. A player link has two halves — the target the click uses, and the text you see — and only the text is touched. A stripped target would open a whisper to a character who does not exist, which is a worse problem than a long name.

For the same reason, item links and every other kind of link are left completely alone. Only player links are rewritten, and only their display half.

Cross-realm names keep their realm. Dropping it would merge two different people into one name in the same conversation.

How it works

ShortNames makes one pass over the finished chat line rather than handling each CHAT_MSG_* event separately. That covers every channel, whispers, emotes and anything an addon prints, and there is no per-event list to fall behind on the day a new channel appears.

/sn debug prints the next five chat lines with their markup escaped, which is the quickest way to see exactly what your client is sending.

Requirements

None. No libraries, no dependencies, no configuration needed — it does something sensible the moment it loads.

Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored but the mode you picked.