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[Untelligent]

While DF's keybinding options make the game much easier to personalize for optimum personal comfort, one problem that people have, on occaison, complained about since the advent of the 31_ series is that the key for "leave screen" has been moved to ESC (likely as a result of allowing the player to pause/unpause while the squad menu is open, and the menu not auto-pausing. Not sure why, since I'd want the game paused during the military operations menu more than any other menu, but that's not the point of this thread).

ANYWAY, people have been disliking using the ESC key for something as common as leaving a screen, generally because it's an unfamiliar key, or it's much further away than the space bar (on my particular keyboard, while I'm typing, the ESC key is one of the few keys I actually have to move my hands for instead of just my fingers). Most of these people, in the last two months, have since either gotten used to the ESC key, or gotten used to using the space key without being able to use it in text entry screens. That's yet another problem I'm sure we've all heard complained about a dozen times over, not being able to search for phrases more than one word long and the like. Some people have gotten around this one by binding "leave screen" to shift+space, but I rather dislike using more than one button to do something unless it's something the button normally does, but bigger (like paging through pages).



SO, I had a... well, I wouldn't call it a brilliant idea, and I wouldn't like to take credit for it because I'm sure I've heard it in passing on other subforums at least once, but I had a half-decent idea: DF ought to have seperate keybindings for "leave screen" and "leave text entry screen" again. Remember back in the pre-31_ era, when places like the trade depot used the F9 button to leave screen so you could type multiple words? Sure, that wasn't a hell of a great button either, but back then we could rebind that one to something better too.

Such an implementation would require NO change to the vanilla keybindings; both the leave screen buttons could be left as ESC, but if they were seperated the players of DF would have greater control over what keys would be most comfortable to them. I suppose the main obstacle to this feature would be putting the thing back in all the old text-entry screens.



I apologize if this specific feature (not just "change the thing back to space," but "seperate the Leave Screen keybindings again") has already been suggested here. I searched for it, but I might not have searched for the right words.


[/walloftext]




tl;dr version: Read the thread title, it says in ten words what the rest of the thing said in ten hundred.

[Draco18s]

Go into your keybindings, its in there.

[Untelligent]

I've looked, but I haven't found a seperate keybinding just for leaving text-entry screens (so I assumed there weren't and made this thread). Are you sure? Where is it relative to other keybinding options?

[Draco18s]

I've looked, but I haven't found a seperate keybinding just for leaving text-entry screens (so I assumed there weren't and made this thread). Are you sure? Where is it relative to other keybinding options?

String Character 032 is the "space" as in the textual space.

Most people change this to shift+space and change the "leave screen" to space so they can have one (familiar) key for going back, and then have shift+space designated for typing.

[Wyrm]

I say it's a legitimate suggestion. The 40d interface was better UI design in that respect and I'm quite surprised Toady changed it at all. Text input is quite different from the menu-driven input. Using the space for exit for menu-driven input was quite a useful thing, and when going into text input, the user changed the way they thought about the space along with the program: the space changed from 'exit' to ' ' quite effortlessly. (Humans are versitle like that.)

It can be accomplished with a user interface object that thinks of the input as text (reserving leaving the screen to other keys), which it swaps out for the normal menu-driven user-interface object that the program uses most of the time. By giving each screen its own user-interface object, the interface doesn't have to be all crammed together in one motif and can be highly context-sensitive.

[Baughn]

I've got this one handled, actually.

[Untelligent]

I've looked, but I haven't found a seperate keybinding just for leaving text-entry screens (so I assumed there weren't and made this thread). Are you sure? Where is it relative to other keybinding options?

String Character 032 is the "space" as in the textual space.

Most people change this to shift+space and change the "leave screen" to space so they can have one (familiar) key for going back, and then have shift+space designated for typing.

Oooh, I hadn't thought of that. Hmm, that's two suggestions I've made since April that were already there but I didn't look hard enough.

I've got this one handled, actually.

By this post, do you mean the thing I just quoted, or do you mean the thing I originally suggested (or something related to that) is going in in the next release or two?