UI inventory with two columns is confusing

[erf]

I find the new inventory UI with two columns confusing in that i have to look both down and to the right instead of just looking down as it used to be with one column. I think it would be better to group item types in one column and rather use the second column as a continuation of the list or for new items if room.

[aidanholm]

The behaviour you suggest is how menus used to work, but it had a number of issues, which have been discussed pretty extensively in ##crawl-dev. One of these is due to weird interactions between resizing the menu and scrolling, and another has to do with sorting items.

We've considered other layout options; there aren't many good ones, since crawl menus have a number of surprisingly subtle and complex constraints. A suggestion from KurzedMetal was to add a single_column_inventory option, which would force the inventory to use only a single column. This is likely to be added before the release.

[bel]

FWIW, I also find the double-column display somewhat disorienting. It's likely to be a matter of habit, so I'll get used to it eventually. An rcfile option for single column sounds good.