The whole hotkey system is currently riddled with issues and probably in desperate need of an overhaul but here are ones that could be fixed without adding a whole new full custom hotkey UI:
Issue 1: When grid hotkeys are selected, the hotkeys displayed in the tooltip do not match the actual hotkeys. The game will still read out the original tooltip strings with the original hotkeys.
A simple hotfix would be to simply not display hotkey strings at all when having grid keybindings enabled. Of course it would be desirable to fully display the hotkey corresponding to the grid position of the ability.
Issue 2: There is no way to adjust the keyboard layout for the grid keybinding. I am not asking for full customization, but at the very least the user should be able to select from a predetermined keyboard layout (qwertz, qwerty, azerty, dvorak, whatever).
A simple hotfix would be to add additional options to the dropdown menu, so it would read:
-classic
-grid (qwerty)
-grid (qwertz)
-grid (azerty)
-grid (dvorak)
-custom
“Issue 3”: Yeah, it’s not much of an issue, but why is there no custom hotkey sample and info files right at the location where the custom hotkeys are stored? Yes, I get it, there probably aren’t many that still read those in 2020 and they are “probably” where custom hotkeys were originally stored, at the install location of the game (mine was updated from an old tft install so no idea about clean installs) but it would not hurt to place a sample file right where the actual file would go since not everyone would know where to look for them.
Issue 4: To my knowledge, there is no way to change item hotkeys in custom hotkey files unless some patch added this feature and it’s merely a matter of poor documentation. Now that grid hotkeys do provide different keys for item slots, it’s that much more egregious that there still is no way to customize those hotkeys in the custom key file.
Adding custom hotkey capabilities for the inventory slots should not be too hard. And when you do this, it would be wise to also add those entries to the sample customkey files, so people could find out how to do it.
Some more hotkey issues that should be classified as missing features rather than bugs:
-There is no way to change the button layout while still using grid hotkeys, so if one wanted to swap the position of the patrol and attack buttons, so that attack is on “a”, it would not be possible.
-There is no way to swap around entire rows of buttons. So if I wanted the Move, stop, etc. Buttons on the bottom and abilities in the top row, I would have to do so in a custom file for every single button and even then, it would completely break with custom maps and simply place custom ability hotkeys randomly.
These non-intrusive hotfixes for those problems should take an experienced programmer not much time to implement and would require a minimal amount of testing. The suggestions at the bottom should be regarded as a list of needed features for when you get around to implement a proper custom hotkey UI.