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The issues I'm having with this are:
Not really sure what to suggest to improve it unfortunately. — st 2011-03-26 23:45
Here are my suggestions for improving this interface.
1. It would help if the square the cursor was on always had a red background. Currently, when the cursor is on an invalid square, it has a white background instead. This can give more information in rare situations, but it makes it much harder to track where the cursor is when the cursor is moving in and out of valid areas, particularly when there are other squares with non-black backgrounds around. The extra information is redundant with the text such as “Out of range” anyways, and generally the lack of a big mass of *s around the cursor will make it obvious when the cursor is in an invalid square. It would be even better if the square with the cursor was the only square on the screen with a red background; this is often not the case (since it's very common to use cloud spells in Elf, and elf corpses on top of other objects are a reverse-video red %). But this would require larger changes to the targeting mode, which are probably not worth it, I think.
2. It is indeed frustrating not to be able to see the edge of the spell's range when the cursor is in its vicinity. I recommend using a different color such as lightblue/blue for squares that are out of range and would currently be lightmagenta/magenta. Gray would be ideal, perhaps, but there are not enough shades available. I think this would look good with shading the rest of the squares that are out of range gray, and make the edge of the spell's range much easier to see.
3, 4. Toggling with : works now, so I think these are no longer issues (perhaps 4 is, a bit, but I don't see a solution which is better than : toggling or moving the cursor onto the monsters to examine them).
5. I agree this is a problem; hopefully my suggestions for 1 and 2 will make things more intuitive, at least. — reid 2011-09-06 04:11