Add an "escape chord" key to allow you to use UI hotkeys without them being interpreted as controls

[petrak@]

If you have the O key bound to a movement, then you can’t press O to Offer in the trade window, making it impossible to trade. There are also lots of other examples of this: movement keys will “cover up” the hotkeys in an item’s menu, quick-jumping to a row in your inventory …

I play on an ergonomic keyboard with no numpad, and after a lot of running into this issue I finally settled on YUI/HJK/NM” … until I started playing with the Sifrah mod, which uses the I key for Insight. I imagine similar problems affect players who play on a laptop.

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So, I propose an “escape chord” key. (This is a terrible name but I can’t think of a better one 😅.) Pressing it, then another key, will have that second key bypass all mapped controls. So, if someone maps O to a movement key, to offer up a trade they can press escape chord and then O.

I probably would leave the key unmapped by default (it does seem like a niche feature), but it’s your game.

Thanks for reading!

(BTW, am I supposed to set the kind/priority/milestone tags myself? I set some, but if they’re incorrect feel free to change them.)

[Mothnox]

It’s probably not quite as niche as it sounds. Older roguelikes, such as Nethack, often use a similar combination of keys for movement, as it not only allows the game to be played easily without a keypad, but also keeps both hands in one place, easily able to reach other letter- or number-based hotkeys.

Personally, I would suggest, rather than having an “escape chord” key as proposed, to instead make keybindings context-based, such that the same key can be used for more than one purpose as long as it’s in a different “context”, as well as allow rebinding the various menu hotkeys such as O, I, etc.

[Brian Bucklew]

all of thise this squirmyness is fixed in the 'beta' branch