Laptop-friendly diagonal movement mode(s)
Create a quick setting to make the game playable with diagonals on laptops without numpads
Yesterday I was installing everything on my new laptop, and although the machine's performance was wonderful, I realized with horror that it no longer had NumLock and a numpad overlay. Apparently, most laptops now don't have it, so there's no way to get even the "fake" numpad in the uiojklm,. keys.
This makes diagonals on laptops even more of a problem than it already was. I think now that ADOM is being resurrected and it's going to become more mainstream (Steam, etc.), we need some explicit option for addressing this, like the ones that have been proposed for ADOM II.
Before someone mentions the venerable vi keys, I respect that option as an option, but it's not for everyone. I'm an experienced computer used and I just can't get used to them. I suppose it'll be the same for most people on Steam.
I think having some key (Shift?) to toggle "movement mode", and "movement mode" changing a square of nine keyboard letters (such as uiojklm,.) to the movement commands (i.e. as in the fake laptop numpads) would be fine.
EDIT: I think my proposal of 23/12/2013 (based on the control scheme of One Way Heroics) is better than this initial idea of the OP. Also see the rest of proposals in the thread for interesting alternatives.