Well, its sort of the case of asking the wrong question.
/hail is more like an emote than a chat command, and it along with a several other emote type of commands can be found in the standard hot button area that contains things like sit, and camp, etc. press alt M to bring it up. At the top are arrows that you can click on to bring up the different banks of buttons. The bank with stuff like hail is on the last bank if I recall correctly.
To set the chat type commands to a hot button might actually be more troble than benefit. As you would need to go in and edit the command line text every time you wanted to say something different. Assuming I've understood your question.
If you meant that you want to have a string of standard text to repeat over and over, like say, a pulling message for a puller you would do it as follows;
Select the third bank of management buttons (alt M) scroll through untill you have a blank one.
Left click it and hold down the mouse button untill the hotbutton sticks to your cursor.
You can then move the hotbutton across to your User Hotbutton Bank and drop it into an empty slot. (You can drop it into any slot but it will overwrite anything you do this too.)
Now right click the empty hot button and an edit box opens up with 5 command lines (I think its five). These command line slots are where you place your command line text to create what are termed "macros" in EQ jargon.
To create a Pulling message you would start in the first slot with;
/g Incoming a %t
This sends a message to your group members in groupt chat and says "Incoming a "what ever you have targeted at the time"
You can then either be "clever" or helpfull by adding something like;
/g One mob per message, adds will be snared and coming in slow - with luck.
or
/g May the Lady Tunare strenghten your arm and grant us victory.
After the third time of seeing the last message everyone in the group starts to grind their teeth, so be thoughtfull in how you use these.
The same principle applies to any of the communication channels;
/say blah blah - goes to everyone around you
/shout Train to DS zone, move your butts or die - goes to the entire zone (and is likely to make you very unpopular
)
/rs Where is everyone I got left behind? - A standard Raid Say message that goes to every one in your raid.
/1 to 10 G'day Aussies - sends a message to members of a unique chat channel that you joined by typing /join "name of chat channel"
You can also use these command lines to add in emotes and/or action commands.
typing /sit will make you sit, obviously.
You could have something that looked like;
/assist Iluien
/g Assisting Iluien
/stand
/cast 3 (3 being the spell slot where the spell you wish to cast is located)
/sit, pause (X)
This would make you target what ever mob Iluien had targeted at the time. Then send a group message telling everyone that you were assisting Iluien, the intention being to make them aware of what mob is about to be or is being attacked. You would then stand up (if you had been sitting, otherwise it is ignored) and cast the spell in slot three. You would then sit down.
I used this example just as a place to start, in practice it is not a good macro because if the spell fizzles, all you have done is spam the group and stand up and then sit down.
It would be better to seperate them into two macros, one performing the assist (the most important hot button you will ever make) and a second one dedicated to casting.
/stand
/cast 3
/pause 5 (this is a variable depending on the reset time for the spell you are trying to cast)
/cast 3
/sit
This gives you two shots at casting the spell in case of a fizzle or interupt. If you are not concerned about interupts the pause can be left out.
You can also append some commands, but not all work and some are counter intuitive, so it is best to experiment with them a bit untill you get things the way you like.
For example you could have;
/cast 3, stand
This should make you stand an then cast spell 3, but I have found that many commands will not work and require a separate command line.
Hope this is what you were looking for.
Edited, Thu Mar 4 19:37:05 2004 by Iluien Edited, Thu Mar 4 19:41:32 2004 by Iluien