How can I customise the UI in The Secret World?

I have read that the interface in the Secret World can be customised. How can I change my chat window and other things in the Secret World?

I want to be able to customise my party list, and only show the raid list when the raid list is enabled like in Stonehenge and make things like my action bar smaller.

Out of the box, the interface is not very configurable at all. What you can do without custom UI modifications (mods) is:

• Move some windows around by dragging on the edges (not the party window though)
• Add chat tabs/windows and customize them by clicking the small gearwheel icon
• Scale the UI in Interface Options (this causes problems with floating combat text though)
• Create, rename and resize inventory windows
• Make inventory windows sticky (lock icon) so they can be used as hotbar for consumables

Anything more than this requires custom UI addons. You can find them at 3rd party sites such as:

• SecretUI
• Curse
• CurseForge (Curse's developer site)

There aren't very many of these yet, since the game is new and Flash based addon development is not as open and accessible as for example World of Warcraft's LUA based addon technology.

The addons themselves are written in Adobe Flash using a game UI middleware called Scaleform GFx.

You can use the command '/option flash_test_gui true' in order to open up the GUI debugger, which will allow you to customise most of the standard UI elements. You will want to be editing the '_root' definitions, so if you're currently seeing '_global' you will need to click the '_root/_global' button at the top of the GUI editor.

Like many other commands entered into the chat window, you can type /option and press TAB to see a list of the options you can set. You can see a list of many of these options and their default values by browsing to your Secret World installation folder and finding the file Data\Gui\Default\CharPrefs.xml. The default installation folder is something like C:\Program Files (x86)\Funcom\The Secret World

Any changes that you make to the default settings will be saved in %localappdata%\Funcom\TSW\Prefs

There is more UI customisation available, for a more comprehensive guide try here.

In addition to UI customisation, The Secret World supports addons from websites like Curse - these are reasonably well covered in Ingmar's answer.