Giddyup

Giddyup is a small addon for World of Warcraft that makes it easy to pick a random mount to use.

Sure, you could use the new (as of 6.0.2) feature to assign mounts as favorites and have the game summon a random one of those, but what if you want to use all your mounts? That's where Giddyup comes in.

Installation

To install Giddyup, copy the entire folder it's in (that should be the folder in which this "Read Me" file is also located) into the Addons folder of World of Warcraft.

On Windows Vista, 7 and 8, it is usually C:\users\public\games\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns
On Windows XP, this folder is most likely located at C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns
On OS X, it is normally /Applications/World of Warcraft/Interface/AddOns

However, the location may be different if you installed World of Warcraft into another folder than the default.

It's best to install the addon when World of Warcraft is not running — if it is, you won't be able to use Giddyup until you quit and restart the game.

Using Giddyup

Once Giddyup has been installed, start World of Warcraft. On the character selection screen, click the Addons button and find Giddyup in the list of addons that appears. Make sure the box before it is checked (it should be, but it's better to be certain).

Once in the game world, you can use Giddyup by typing the following commands into the chat:

/giddyup: Gives an overview of how to use Giddyup.
/gup: Alternative form of the basic command — anywhere this guide says /giddyup, you can use /gup instead to save yourself some typing.
/giddyup any: Summons a random mount of any type.
/giddyup dismount: Dismounts you if you're mounted (except if you're flying). If you're not mounted, doesn't do anything.
/giddyup fly: Summons a random flying mount (gryphon, wind rider, drake, flying cloud, etc.).
/giddyup ground: Summons a random ground mount (horse, trike, mammoth, you name it, but also water striders).
/giddyup pass: Summons a mount that can carry passengers (such as the larger mammoths, Mechano-Hog/Mekgineer's Chopper, etc.).
/giddyup repair: Summons a mount that carries a repair NPC (Traveler's Tundra Mammoth, for example).
/giddyup swim: Summons a random swimming mount (there are very few of those in the game, beyond a couple of turtles and the Vashj'ir Seahorse).
/giddyup (pattern): Summons a random mount whose name contains pattern; the parentheses () must be included.
/giddyup (!pattern)
/giddyup ('pattern): Summons a random mount whose name does not contain pattern; the parentheses () must be included.

Notes

Any of the commands that summon a mount will only do so when you're dismounted. If you're already mounted when using the command, you'll be dismounted instead, unless you're flying at the time (this is a safety check, to prevent you from falling to your death by accident).
Giddyup will only summon a mount that you can actually use, depending on where you are, your Riding skill, and more. If you have (or there are) no suitable mounts, it will give a warning that you don't seem to have any mounts of the kind you asked for. For example, this is likely to happen if you try to summon a swimming mount while you're on dry land, or if you specify a (pattern) that doesn't match any of your mounts.
Many (but not all) flying mounts are considered to be usable even if you're in an area where you can't actually fly — if you don't want a flying mount in areas where you can't fly, use /giddyup ground instead of /giddyup any. This is Blizzard's doing, not Giddyup's, as there doesn't seem to be a way of detecting if you can fly in an area, only whether flying in general is allowed.
Using /giddyup swim can summon a water strider only if you're actually swimming at the time — when you're not, water striders are considered ground mounts. You can use swim even when on land because some swimming mounts are also usable there.
The commands /giddyup (pattern), /giddyup (!pattern) and /giddyup ('pattern) can be used to limit the selection of mounts from which Giddyup will chose. For example, /giddyup (Serpent) will only summon a mount whose name includes the word "Serpent" while /giddyup (!Serpent) or /giddyup ('Serpent) will choose any mount that doesn't have that word in its name. You must include the parentheses, so Giddyup will know it's a pattern you're specifying — this to avoid confusion over whether, say, fly means "I want any flying mount" or "I want one of the mounts that has fly in its name" such as a Flying Carpet. The pattern is case-insensitive, so it doesn't matter whether you use capital or lower-case letters. (The alternative forms for not including pattern are to cater to both programmers' and mathematicians' expectations, with thanks to Caderic.)
If you have a Sea Turtle, try /giddyup any on a character that's below level 20. (Thanks for the tip, Dherv :)

Announcement of Mounting or Dismounting

You can optionally include a message after any, dismount, fly, ground, or swim by separating it from the command by a space. Your character will then say this message (as if using /say) when mounting up. You can include %s (a percent symbol followed by a lower-case letter "s") to have the character say the mount's name. For example:

/giddyup fly %s, fly, into the light of the dark black night!

will summon a random flying mount (fly); if it happens to pick a Jade Cloud Serpent, your character will say "Jade Cloud Serpent, fly, into the light of the dark black night!" as it gets summoned.

You can specify which chat channel you want to announce your mount to, by adding that at the beginning of your message just as for normal chat. For example:

/giddyup fly /p %s, fly, into the light of the dark black night!

would make the announcement in party chat (/p).

To prevent spamming and reaching too wide an audience, only a limited number of channels are supported:

Guild: /g and /guild.
Officer: /o and /officer.
Party: /p and /party.

Anything else will default to using /s (or /say). So no, you can't /yell or spam Trade chat with your mount choice.

Macros

If you always want to use the same message, you can easily make a macro of it. Follow these steps if you don't know how to do this:

Type /macro into the chat and press the Return key; this will open the macros window.
Choose whether you want the macro to be available to all your characters, or only the one you're currently playing. If you want it for all, click the "General Macros" tab at the top of the window, else click the "<Character Name> Specific Macros" tab.
Click on the New button near the bottom of the macro window. A second window will open, in which you must type a name and select an icon for your macro. (You can scroll down the list of icons and find the ones for all the mounts in the game that way, though it may take some searching.) The name or icon you choose don't matter, really, but pick something you can easily recognize; also, you can't have two macros with the same name, but you can have two with the same icon if you think that's a good idea. Then click the Okay button to close this window.
Click the large text area in the macros window and type the Giddyup command you want into it. For example, if you're making a macro for ground mounts, type /giddyup ground into this field. You can use any of the options described above, just as when you type the command into the chat window.
Click the macro's icon and drag it to your action bar. This will let you click it like any of the action bar buttons the game normally provides for you.
Repeat steps 2 through 5 for any additional Giddyup action bar buttons you need — for example, if you want separate buttons for flying mounts, ground mounts, and to dismount, you would need to create three macros in all and drag each of them to your action bar.
When you're done, close the macros window.

Thanks To

Caderic, Dhervish, Inyx and Zymaldi (Engineer Extraordinnaire!), for taking this thing for a spin and suggesting improvements.

Change Log

Version 0.4.1 (2014-11-20)

Fixed a very small but very important bug that prevented the whole addon from working. Important lesson: don't forget to close a string.

Version 0.4 (2014-11-20)

If you dismount by using a "mount" command, an announcement is no longer made.

Added commands to summon passenger-carrying and repair mounts.

Added commands to summon mounts based on whether or not their names match a pattern.

Version 0.3 (2014-11-19)

Added a check to prevent being dismounted while flying.

If swimming, /giddyup swim can now summon water striders, which count as ground mounts when you're not swimming.

Added ability to post to different chat channels.

Changed to a beta version because it's been tested some more and seems to work OK.

Version 0.2 (2014-11-18)

Improved the routine to pick a mount: instead of just choosing a random mount and only then seeing if it's been collected and usable (then going back to step 1 if it failed that test), the addon now goes through all mounts to find the ones that are collected and usable, then chooses one from among those only.

Version 0.1 (2014-11-17)

Initial alpha version. Who knows what's wrong with it.

Before Version 0.1

The author used macros to accomplish much the same thing. With the release of WoW 6.0 in October 2014, though, those stopped working because Blizzard removed many of the companion functions and replaced them by similar ones with much longer names (instead of GetCompanionInfo() you now have to call functions like C_MountJournal.GetMountInfo() and C_MountJournal.GetMountInfoExtra() for example) which meant the updated macros couldn't fit in the 255 characters allowed for a macro anymore. Thus, the need for this addon was created.