Please share your PROTOSS keyboard GRID

General Discussion
1

I want to start playing again, for years i have been using the classic Protoss keyboard hotkeys, that means making my hand jump all over the keyboard when i am sure there is a better layout.

I understand that everyone has to test whats better for each person, but i wonder if anyone has a suggestion of a keyboard layout for Protoss that doesn’t require me to move my left hand that much. I have heard Reach`s keyboard is somewhere in teamliquid but i cant seem to find it…

Please could someone help? i have been not playing regularly for a few weeks and i want to wire my brain again. Thank you-

2

Here’s how I did my hotkeys. I don’t know how they’ll do for you, maybe you’ll want to do a few things differently, but here they are if you think they’re a good start:

Attack and stop are still A and S, but hold position for me is D and patrol F. Q-T are my abilities, and control groups 1-5 are my main army.

For the macro, I’ve laid my hotkeys out in a grid fashion, that is, having them correlate to the buttons on the command card. For example, Q is the top leftmost letter key on the keyboard, so it gets units that are top left on the command card (Zealot, Shuttle, Scout). The same applies for buildings and upgrades, so Q is Nexus, Robo facility, ground weapons, research psi storm, etc.

When it comes to training Probes, my train Probe hotkey is Y. That may sound strange, but then I bind my Nexuses to 6-8, which are right next to the Y key. For the Probes themselves, Q is basic buildings, W is advanced buildings, and E is return cargo.

Other notes: I use control groups 9 and 0 for more miscellaneous units, like harass shuttles, recall arbiters, and observers that are spying on their main base. I use the F2 camera hotkey for the bulk of my gateways, while F3 and F4 are for my main and natural. Sometimes if I have another large group of gateways at another base, I’ll use F3 for those other gateways instead of for my main.

And that’s about all there is to how I handle my hotkeys as Protoss. It took me a little bit to get used to the new hotkey setup, but now it’s completely natural to me. Overall I find this to be a well-organized and well-condensed setup for hotkeys, and I hope this helps you find your own hotkey setup. If you’re wondering about anything else regarding my hotkeys, feel free to ask me.

gl hf

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3

That sounds like an awesome system, and one that can be used for all the races! I’ve just stuck with the hotkeys the game came with (hard to change a 20-year old habit!) and I have my hand dancing all over the keyboard. I’m definitely going to give that a go though.

Does it take long to change it all?

4

For the most part, yes. However, while I found this hotkey system easy with Terran and Protoss, it posed some challenge when structuring the keyboard for Zerg. Because workers and combat units both come from larvae, I found it unnatural to have the drone key on Y and the rest of the units be on the grid style all the way left. Eventually I settled on putting the select larvae and drone morph hotkeys on Q instead of Y. It works for me, but I main as Protoss on ladder. I haven’t used this setup much when playing as Zerg against other people, and so even after all the thought I put into structuring my hotkeys for Zerg, I still wonder if there’s a better way of organizing them.

But yeah, I think this hotkey system is very universal for all three races. And while we’re talking about the other races, it may be worth noting that as Terran, I bound scanner sweep to P and I put my comsat stations on 8-0.

It’s not that hard to set the hotkey profile up. Five to ten minutes. Getting accustomed to my new hotkeys weren’t that hard either. I played Broodwar with its default hotkeys for 12 years, but I managed to get used to my hotkey overhaul in just a few days. I recommend playing around in single player to become comfortable with a new setup of hotkeys.

5

I’ve just played the first 5 Terran missions with the new layout… a bit funny at first. On mission 5 (“Revolution”) I had trouble unloading the dropships quickly because my hand automatically went to the standard hotkey! But it’s very efficient.

All I did was change the keys to Q, W, E, A, S, D, Z, X, C, based on their positions in the main corner display. The only differences were that I set up Zerg Burrow as “B”, and “A” for attack, “S” for stop, “D” for patrol and “F” for hold position. That way the commands are all in one line. Move was kept as “M” because I never use it. Also, build basic and build advanced were “Q” and “W” as you mentioned.

Lots of fun, and like you say, I reckon I’ll be used to it in no time! :smiley:

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6

OMG thank you so much !!! this is a great idea, i understand that for Zerg you must indeed make some modification because fingers tend to die when trying to press s and anything near. Thank you so much i will try to wire this one in, i am sure my game will improve a lot with this but ill probably have to play some with AI first.

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