Okay I'm a newbie to dwarf fortress. While I enjoy it a lot to discover things here is a little positive critic. I know as newcomer you miss a lot of stuff, but on the other things you have the advantages yet to see things others got so well experienced already, they don't see it anymore. I find the consistent change which keyboard arrows to use very unconformting. Often you use the arrow keys, then you need to use the +/- signs on the num pad, then again you need to use the 8,5,4,6 keys, then some letters.. Every screen has its own arrowset. I know once you play DF for a month, you might get so used to which screen takes which arrows, you wont notice it anymore.. but it really to rethink it, it could improve on newcomers if it would only one arrowkey set you use all the time. Even if this means using modes (like e.g. the tab key) to switch between tasks what the arrows do... It might look less effective at first since you use more keypresses to get a complicated thing done, but it is likely to be in the end more effective even for experienced users, since this way your right hand can rest on the arrowkeyset, while the left hand switches modes, you dont have to move the hands around to different arrowkeysets...Oh and I play with a notebook, so the numpad is really a bit additional annoyance, since I have to hold that FN key all the time to use the numpad... Otherwise keep the job going, I just learned to love DF.
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Topic: HCI: Keyboard uniformity (Read 1656 times)