Flavour: playing without a number pad.
I did important work for FOE and the other roguelikes. I've worked out several options for playing without a number pad. The number pad of a full keyboard is used to input directional commands. What if your keyboard doesn't have a number pad? There are ways to play without it. One option is a laptop's numpad which often overlays the standard keyboard. This would be annoying to use, assuming you even have this feature on your laptop. Another option is to buy a USB numpad, which is my recommendation. They're cheap, but maybe you don't have the buckage to spare after all.
The other three options will be provided by the game. You can toggle an on-screen D-pad with clickable direction buttons, but this could be rather inconvenient in a game where your hands are supposed to stay on home row as much as possible. There are two keyboard alternatives, what I call the phony pad as well as the vi keys option (for Unix nerds of the 1970s), which can be toggled with the '}' and '|' keys respectively. The problem with any keyboard option is that it takes away ready access to the commands ordinarily mapped to those keys, so you may have to toggle off the option whenever you wish to access those commands. To ameliorate that, the phony pad and vi keys option will be capital letters, thus requiring you to turn on Caps Lock; that way, to access some more common lowercase-key commands, all you have to do is turn off Caps Lock a moment or just press Shift. The vi keys in particular are only provided for those already familiar with them. They're very traditional, being the original control configuration even of the game Rogue itself, but for most of us under the age of 40 it will be far too unintuitive.
The USB numpad option is definitely the best, but I want to accommodate players with this freeware as much as reasonable.
It's all documented in the Command Reference section of the manual.
The other three options will be provided by the game. You can toggle an on-screen D-pad with clickable direction buttons, but this could be rather inconvenient in a game where your hands are supposed to stay on home row as much as possible. There are two keyboard alternatives, what I call the phony pad as well as the vi keys option (for Unix nerds of the 1970s), which can be toggled with the '}' and '|' keys respectively. The problem with any keyboard option is that it takes away ready access to the commands ordinarily mapped to those keys, so you may have to toggle off the option whenever you wish to access those commands. To ameliorate that, the phony pad and vi keys option will be capital letters, thus requiring you to turn on Caps Lock; that way, to access some more common lowercase-key commands, all you have to do is turn off Caps Lock a moment or just press Shift. The vi keys in particular are only provided for those already familiar with them. They're very traditional, being the original control configuration even of the game Rogue itself, but for most of us under the age of 40 it will be far too unintuitive.
The USB numpad option is definitely the best, but I want to accommodate players with this freeware as much as reasonable.
It's all documented in the Command Reference section of the manual.