The Tavern

So i play in dark i put nice music and... i cannot find stupid P key as it is somewhere on my right, while W key is perfectly under my finger.

Can change P key(that puts jewellery on) into W key as all weapons and armour uses.
that way we just use one key to acces most items.

i also had an idea to use unified menu.
like once you acces a certain item page for example a sword.
each option from left to right would have corresponding key generated from QWERTY etc. (well D-drop W-wear keys are quite comfortable)

but this P key, who invented that?

Still don't understand why we need [W]ear and [T]ake off and [P]ut on and [R]emove. Can't we just use one singular menu instead of this bizarre double thing? It's not even consistent-- you'd think Take Off and Put On would be in the same category but I guess they're mixed with Wear and Remove for some reason.
I realize this would break muscle memory for lots of people but it would certainly be better for new players.

I believe the reason for this distinction is that wearing armor takes much more time than putting on jewelry. Making jewelry take as long to take off and put on as armor would be a good change though.

Also it makes the number of items in each menu much shorter (thereby reducing the amount of things you have to look at) since the circumstances under which you'll be wearing different armour and switching jewelry is not very similar.

There's no doubt that condensing the W and P menus into just W would make for a larger W menu. On the other hand, you'd eliminate the P menu entirely and there'd be much less reason to carry jewelry swaps, so you get a residual effect on the i and d menus as well. Fewer items in inventory means a lot less item shuffling. So just looking at menu interactions, you come out ahead.

But it's the removal of jewelry swapping from tactical situations where you get the big improvement.

It would be great to unify all these commands (weapon, armour, jewellery) into one action, I suggest (E)quip and (U)nequip. The old commands can remain or become aliases for those of us with too much muscle memory.

I don't think the differing action times prevents this unification from happening, btw.

I don't see the point of acting on this issue without mechanical unification of armor and jewelry equip actions. The interface-only changes suggested in this thread either result in longer menus to browse or more top level commands to learn or accidentally activate.

Removing 4 commands has quite the opposite effect, new players would need to learn less commands, not more.

Weapon and jewelry are very similar, both can be changed in a fight and it takes 3-5 auts. If there is no warning for changing armour when there are hostile monsters in view, we can add it.

Currently we have flavor causing problems to usability/friendliness and the latter is more important IMHO.

That would be a very nice change to unify those menus. At least merge (w)ield and (P)ut as they are quick actions which you constantly do in combat (swap weapons, swap rings).

Most of you probably know this but here's an option/rc code which lets you to remove/take-off items from the same menu as wielding/wearing by clicking on item which is used. Try it out: equip_unequip = true . Also, I think this option should be ON by default.

Regarding felid guy's post, you need to contend with the balance between the number of top level commands (which the post you fav'd proposes increasing, not decreasing) and the number of items that appear in the associated menus. As the game wears on you get an increasingly large number of swaps, particularly for jewelry, each of which is increasingly complicated (randarts with lots of properties, many of them numerical with both pluses and minuses). The more stuff you throw onto the menu the more brain-searing this listing of textual symbols becomes, especially now that we're talking about putting not just armor and jewelry together but weapons too.

I actually like the distinction between (W)ear and (P)ut on, but I hate the distinction between (R)emove and (T)ake off. It took me a long time to find the 'T' command.

As a compromise between people wanting 1 or 2 menus, you could put the jewellery in a separate section underneath the armour. (Whilst still maintaining the functionality of the T key.) That way it can all be accessed through 1 key, old keys still work, and people who like the current keys won't have to scroll down any more than they used to.

As a pet peeve of mine, you could also include the weapon in the R menu (at the bottom).

I thanked that post but that does not necessarily mean I agree with everything in it. I hope devs won't keep current keys so only 2 keys will be used instead of 6, we don't have keys from 0.4 version, right?



Hopefully the change will result in splitting inventory sizes into categories, IMHO it is not right that Felid, Mummy or Troll can have more wands/scrolls in inventory. We need to have max N scrolls, max M potions, max P wands and so on instead of single limit of 52 for everything and then the universal E/U key will bring a list of all weapons/armour/jewelry sorted by category which will fit on a single screen. But it is off topic in this thread.

oh just pls not (U)nequip

(U) is just so far away as well. most people around this planet far eaast and west trikes WSAD and maybe part of QWERTY keys.
try (E)quip (R)emove. so easy so cool. Everyone would like it.

Don't unify the commands. Both the contexts in which you use (W)ear and (P)ut on commands, and the results of using them, are completely different. Even unifying the equip times between jewellery and armor would only (partially) solve the second problem and do very little for the first. With a unified command, there's a lot more cognitive load as you have to look through a longer list to find the item you want. Breaking the list into sections helps somewhat, but it's still worse than just having a specific command. Cognitively, it's pretty similar to having a subcommand, because you have to think "Wear - wear what? - Armor - what armor?", even if the middle part doesn't require a key press. It's just a lot less tiring if the thought process is simply "Wear armor - what armor?".

I remember someone pointed out once that one of the reasons NetHack doesn't have a unified (a)pply command that eats food, quaffs potions, and applies tools is because that would make it far too easy to eat a cockatrice corpse and die. Obviously Crawl doesn't have anything quite that stupid, but the general point still stands: having different commands for different actions may make for a steeper initial learning curve, but ultimately the interface becomes easier to use and less error-prone. There's a reason that text editors with a zillion commands like vi or emacs are so popular with programmers.

Speaking of vi, if you're having trouble reaching keys, seriously give the vi-keys a shot. Since it's just the ordinary home-row position (or home-row with the right hand one key over), every command is easily reachable without having to move your hand or stretch.

One of the reasons why I like OP so much is because nowadays I qualify as a new player, I have breaks of several months between crawl sessions. When I resume playing, every time I forget which keys I should use to equip jewelry (P) so I have to open help page and find the key there. Also even when I was playing actively I often confused T with R, they just make little sense as indicated in one of messages above.

I'm pretty sure that (R)emove and (T)ake off are redundant, actually. You can unequip items through the (W)ear and (P)ut on menus. If you want to remember half as many keys, you can do that right now. I don't particularly care about the answer to this question, just thought I'd put in a hot tip.

What I would really like is wear/wield/puton to have items on the ground available in the menu (where it would drop the item you were replacing it with if you didn't have enough inventory space to pick it up, and prompt you to do so)

I would just like to point out that the argument that unifying the commands would make large menus is kinda shaky.
Unless you're standing on a large pile of items, the hypothetical unified menu for equipping/unequipping would still be significantly shorter than the 'i' inventory menu.

... and don't even get me started on the ^F menu!

One key to wear them all, One key to find them,
One key to remove all them and in the darkness bind them

Currently, the '%' key brings up a character information screen that allows players to interact with their equipped items (but apparently not to equip items). Why not change the binding to 'E' for Equip and rework the hotkeys on that screen to consistently refer to the equipment slot rather than the equipped item? Players could then don or shed as much their equipment as they wish before closing the screen or spotting a monster. This change needn't interfere with the existing hotkeys for players that prefer them.