I just mash my face on the keyboard and hope for the best. ewrghe3h5ry5gyge53r dfct354
I use WAXD and ring finger A, middle W, index D and thumb is for X and space.
This is what I used to do and part of why I went with WAXD when I switched to the left side of the keyboard since it felt more natural compared to the spacing on the keypad.
Oh yes, reconfiguring was a necessary bothersome first step in any games (what with games not supporting some of the keys often). Also wasn’t very optimal : only three fingers were doing all the work, with the pinky and thumb basically on vacation. Maybe the pinky on A aversion goes back there!
I kind of enjoyed having to basically move the body to type: I always have been distressed by the possibility of inputting keyboard commands in chat by mistake the other way — that’d be a serious infraction!
I can sort of understand the rationale in the article of just keeping your fingers where they start on the home row, but my ring finger doesn’t have the dexterity of my other fingers (isn’t that true for most people?) so it’s hard to imagine going in with no experience, trying to move forward and backward with your ring finger, and not recoiling at the idea of putting that much responsibility on my ring finger.
So yeah, I did WASD with my pinky on shift, as I assumed most people did, for a while.
Then I just moved everything over to the right one column, moved with ESDF, and felt like that was better because my pinky could still hit shift comfortably for sprinting, but it also opened up Q/A/Z as other stuff I could map for my pinky to do so its only job wasn’t sprinting.
Then I got truly experimental and mapped movement to E: forward / D: backward / R: strafe left / F: strafe right. My thinking was that since you’re never moving simultaneously in opposite directions on the same axis, it was wasteful to tie up two fingers with left and right movement when one finger could manage.
It was easy enough to retrain myself for this layout, but I don’t know if freeing up my ring finger truly helped in any way. I felt clever though, and that’s half the battle!
And I was always comfortable sliding back to home row positions from any game controls if I needed to type, I was blindly doing that with my right hand from the mouse anyway, so it never seemed like a complication to move my left hand slightly if I needed to type.
Oh, this subject again. Search moar, noob
Some years ago I posted
SHIFT-z-x-a
s for jump
c for crouch
w for sprint
and some yot replied:
No. Pinky is for Shift, Control or Alt, as God intended. Who the shit uses their pinky?
Because it’s fucking insane and you know it.
Bollox. Your ring finger is on that big shift key, which anchors your whole hand. I mean, I can WASD now but back when Quake introduced mouselook stabbing the wrong keys was a real issue.
Also: Hay Guise, let’s start a thread on whether or not your reverse Y-axis on FPS
Always remapped WASD one column over to ESDF, per typing class. A pain in the ass that it was never an option to start.
Is this ever relevant in a game other than the first System Shock?
I used AZ<shift>X as a kid too! Switched to WSAD geez, maybe 20 years ago.
Frankly, AZ<shift>X is more comfortable, but it was annoying reconfiguring every game.
Some of you people are fucking weird.
It’s relatively painless on most, but on, say, Arma, with its absolutely absurd array of quintuple presses and key usage, I just go WASD. Flexible, man, that’s the key.
Not a chance, we’re talking muscle memory here. It was hard switching to WSAD.
You assume that I learned to touch type instead of just getting really good at blind hunting and pecking.
Yeah, once I get used to something, it’s really hard to switch. Case in point: Mercenaries 2 had A to accelerate on the controller, instead of Right Trigger. After the 50th time I made the mistake, I just gave up and never went back to the game.
Lookit all the cavemen in here using the same input device for spreadsheets and games. : )