Proposal - Realign the command sets

[Bill Peterson]

HJKL came from the vi editor (1976), which was created and widely used at Berkeley when Rogue(1980) was invented. Anyone who was familiar with either one, or any later variant of rogue, has HJKL in muscle memory

Thanks for the history lesson. I came late to Unix and Emacs was already well established. The only experience I had with vi is watching the vi/Emacs flamewars on USENET.

[Julian]

That's also a very good point. The average gamer 'expects' WASD.

I'm unconvinced. The average gamer expects a controller or a touchscreen. WASD is very much a PC first-person shooter thing, and I don't see any reason to think it instinctively translates from that context to an eight-cardinal-directions one. QWEADZXC would make more sense for that.

In any event, the idea was to harmonize the existing command sets. I'm unconvinced that upending everything and creating a brand-new command set would make any noticeable improvement in the game's appeal.

If you wanna argue that we should go to a compass in the letter keys because the roguelikes are kind of awkward (which they are), try the right side. YUIHKNM, or IOPKL:,./ would make the most sense, but I'm not going to try to make it work.

In particular, putting everything on the left side makes control-direction much, much harder, since not all keyboards have right-side control keys. (The one I'm on now doesn'€™t, for instance.)

[Julian]

HJKL came from the vi editor (1976), which was created and widely used at Berkeley when Rogue(1980) was invented. Anyone who was familiar with either one, or any later variant of rogue, has HJKL in muscle memory

These days, it’s mostly that NetHack uses those directional keys, which is a good argument for keeping them.

(Other rogue likes may also, but I’m not familiar with them.)

[will_asher]

These days, it’s mostly that NetHack uses those directional keys, which is a good argument for keeping them.

(Other rogue likes may also, but I’m not familiar with them.)

Yup. I originally came to Angband after playing Nethack for a long time and had gotten very used to the roguelike commands then.