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Hotkeys.

So for the longest time I've always wanted to be as efficient as possible, looking at potential hotkey set-up that could improve my game. A long time ago I settled with Idra hotkeys (1, 2, 3 for army, 4 for hatches, 5,6,7, etc for queens) and the 55v, 66v inject method. However, the constant lack of screen hotkeys always made me feel less optimal. Now for a while I've been looking at TheCore as an option for hotkeys, however the move to the right side of the keyboard as well as full loss of muscle memory always stopped me.

Then at the beginning of this month, I talked to my teammate pig about screen hotkeys and primarily that I couldn't get used to them (f1, f2, f3, f4 specifically). He replied that he thought they were essential and that kawaii and him reckon that you need at least 7 (aka 7 bases all on hotkey) to be the most effective with them. Jared even said that perhaps the 4-7th bases that I wasn't able to jump to with my queen hotkeys were actually the more important reason to get hotkeys. I was baffled at how someone could use f7 as a standard hotkey with it being above 9 (albeit slightly to the left) on my keyboard. So Jared got me in a chat with kawaii and we talked for a bit and he said that he used f1-f7 as bases, space as creep/rally and w as queens. He then would inject by going w, f1v, f2v, f3v and so on. He then went on to say that he was comfortable with using f7 because of his prior BW experience, fair enough.

So moving on I decided that if I stuck with my current hotkeys but then used f1-f4 for my 4-7th bases and go with that. PiG said that perhaps it would be confusing going from 7 as my third to f1 as my 4th and I did agree but thought that given enough time with the setup I could get used to it. I played with it for a while and while it did in theory work, it was very unituitive and using queens for movement still wasn't as efficient as I'd like to be. I then looked back into TheCore, I asked fenner about it on twitter, and his response confirmed what I already thought, the jump might not really be worth the time it took to get used to the completely changed hotkeys.

So finally I went back to the drawing board. I asked pig about the location of his f keys, personally my f4 is in between 5 and 6, slightly to the 6. He said that his was directly above 5. At that point I basically said to myself, ok I need a new keyboard, this one is restricting me. So I got a cm keyboard of my choice (still coming at this point) and kept thinking about hotkeys. I wanted 4 army hotkeys over my previous 3, the 7 camera hotkeys (preferably without any modifiers eg shift f1 as a hotkey) and a way to inject using camera hotkeys. Eventually I realised that I didn't need to use 5, 6, 7 as control groups if I was going to inject with camera hotkeys. So this means that with the new keyboard I can go from f4 straight down to 5 as my 5th base. So basically I decided that using 5, 6 and 7 as my camera hotkeys was both intutive, not super to the right of the keyboard (like using f keys would be) and I was used to pressing 7 from my previous hotkeys. I messed with some different keys to hotkey my queens and now have settled with the w that kawaii uses. Oh and yeah space for creep spread. I didn't get the 4 hotkeys that would've been ideal but 3 is definitely enough if I control well enough.

So there you go, my thoughts about hotkeys and what I think might be the best way to go about using camera hotkeys when you are used to a standard layout. If you use w as your hatches like pig does I think you can easily just use 4 as all your queens instead and be the same.

So yeah, thought I'd make a quick blog about this since I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Thanks to my sponsors who you can check out below and Exile5 who support our entire team so well .

Thanks for reading!