[G] Protoss Hotkeys 101

The first way to make improvements over standard hotkeys is rebinding some of the more inconvenient default hotkeys – while doing this, our philosophy will be to try and localize everything on the left-hand side of the keyboard for easier access. I’ll list all the changes I suggest you make, as well as explaining why I recommend them.

1. Rebind “Build immortal” on the robotics facility from ‘i’ to ‘r’ – no more reaching over half the keyboard to make one of the most standard and important (not to mention awesome) Protoss units.

2. Rebind “Build mothership” on the Nexus from ‘m’ to ‘r’ – same reasoning as the immortal rebind, this will let you easily start your mothership while never looking away from your army or taking your hand away from the left side of the keyboard.

3. Rebind “Build nexus” on a probe from ‘n’ to ‘h’ – this is optional, but ‘h’ is slightly easier to hit than ‘n’ in my opinion, and also avoids the off by one misclicks where you hit v - > b instead of b -> n and accidentally try to build a robo bay instead of nexus.

4. Rebind control group ‘0’ to ‘q’ – in order to do this, you will need to change create control group 0, add to control group 0, and select control group 0 to ‘ctrl + q’, ‘shift + q’, and ‘q’ respectively. This is an essential change in my opinion – q is one of the most accessible key, yet is used for absolutely nothing in standard Protoss gameplay. Having an extra control group can be used to improve your macro (hotkey production structures, like gateways for easy warp gate morph) or map awareness (hotkey a warp prism for harass or observer for vision).

5. Rebind ‘Spacebar’ to something more useful than jump to alert – it’s up to you how to best utilize this easily accessed key, but a few suggestions include another control group, base camera (this cycles through your bases, which can be very useful for manipulating your camera while macroing – more on camera manipulation later), or patrol move (a useful unit feature that is tough to access with its default bind of ‘p’ – use patrol moves to constantly scout for hidden expos, or fully cover wide ramps with vision, etc).

6. Rebind tilde (the button next to ‘1’ on most keyboards, looks like `) to something useful – personally, I have it bound to “Select idle worker” but it could also be used as an extra control group depending on your personal preference. Even if you have enough control groups for all your buildings, production, and units, one way to take advantage of an extra control group is using it to hotkey a proxy pylon – then, when you want to warp in units, instead of having to scroll away from battle, warp in, and scroll back, you can just jump your camera to the pylon instantly by double-tapping the control group.

Alright, so now we’ve re-positioned some of the more awkward default bindings, and have an extra control group or two – what’s the next thing we can improve on? Camera hotkeys!

For those who don’t know what a camera hotkey is, let me explain briefly – a camera hotkey is just like a normal hotkey, except instead of binding a unit or building, you’re binding a location on the screen. Camera hotkeys help a ton by enabling you to manage your camera much more efficiently than clicking / dragging with your mouse. I’ll explain here what hotkeys I use for camera bindings, as well as what each hotkey goes to. At the start of a game, after splitting your workers and starting your probe, take the time to set up all these camera hotkeys and cycle through them. Even if you’re not comfortable using them past the start of the game initially, it’s good practice and spamming your camera hotkeys early game will help you become comfortable using them.

1. Bind “Create location 1” to “shift + F1” – the default bindings for this are “control + F5” which is quite awkward to reach and hard to use. I use this to hotkey the screen of my main base.

2. Bind “Create location 2” to “shift + F2” – use this to hotkey the screen at your natural.

3. Bind “Create location 3” to “shift + F3” – use this to hotkey the screen at your 3rd base.

4. Bind “Create location 4” to “shift + F4” – use this to hotkey the screen at your 4th base.

5. Bind “Create location 5” to “shift + F5” – use this to hotkey the screen at your 5th base.

Nobody will be able to start using camera hotkeys perfectly without practice, so just try to implement these into your gameplay one step at a time – for example, when you take your natural expansion, instead of dragging your camera there, just select a probe and press F2! If you are persistent about using them every game, your mechanics WILL improve noticeably.

Now, moving forward – many people in this community have gaming peripherals, ranging from fancy keyboards to gaming mice. Let’s talk about how we can use some of the nifty features of such peripherals to further improve our mechanics and gameplay.

If you have a gaming keyboard, sometimes there is a row of extra macro keys on the far left side. While it is illegal (as far as tournaments go) to bind sequences of keys to these macros, it is tournament-legal to bind single keys to them. I suspect this section will apply to a relatively small portion of the gaming community (I don’t even have a keyboard with these macro keys), but it is a source for free camera / unit hotkeys if you do have such a keyboard. An easy way to set up these hotkey is simply rebinding random keys from the right side of the keyboard (such as l, k, j, h) to the macro keys.

Picture of gaming keyboard with macro keys:



Lastly, if you have a gaming mouse, those often have extra buttons on the side or top of the mouse. For example, I use a Razer Deathadder which has two extra buttons on the left side of the mouse.

Picture of Razer Deathadder:



I use the first extra mouse button (the forward one) as a camera hotkey – pressing “ctrl + forward mouse button” creates the hotkey, and pressing the button jumps to the saved screen region. I use this to easily jump my camera to my ramp in the early game, and to hotkey proxy pylons in the mid / late game so that I can quickly warp-in and then jump back to the action.

I use the second mouse button (the back one) for the “base camera” hotkey, so that I can easily scroll through all my bases with a few clicks of a mouse button. These might seem like pretty small changes, but my mechanics increased a ton based on just utilizing those two extra buttons on my mouse. Being able to jump to proxy pylons during a fight to warp-in improved both my micro and macro, and cycling through my bases in a macro game helps me manage my saturations a lot more carefully and be more aware of spending my chronoboost.

For those of you who don’t have any fancy gaming peripherals, I created a SC2hotkey file with the basic changes implemented for you! I’ll quickly run over the hotkeys that aren’t standard in this file:

- Control group 0 is bound to ‘q’ – use ctrl + q, shift + q, and q to make, add to, and select the control group, respectively
- Tilde (`) selects idle worker
- Base camera is bound to spacebar
- Patrol move has been moved to ‘n’
- 5 Camera Hotkeys are bound to F1-F5; use shift + the corresponding F key to create the hotkeys.
- Build immortal and build mothership are both rebound to ‘r’.

You can grab the file here:

Sendspace link

Mediafire link

Message me here on teamliquid if both of these links stop working for you and I will upload it again someplace else and update this section.

NOTE: This hotkey file is only to be used for Protoss. It has incomplete bindings for Zerg / Terran - if you want to use other races, what you should do is create a hotkey profile for each race using this one as a template (that's an option when you create a new hotkey profile in Starcarft II). Then just go through the list of Unbound hotkeys and fix everything for a certain race - for example, you can bind Queen to W as Zerg and then you can still use Q as a control group.

To use it, just go to Documents - > Starcraft II - > Accounts – in this folder, you will see a folder named after a random 8-digit number (each folder corresponds to an account used on your computer, if you don’t know which one belongs to the account you want to use, just click the folders, look at the hotkey profiles inside until you find the one with your hotkey files in it). Once you've found your account, open the folder and stick the RemarKToss.SC2Hotkeys file in the “Hotkeys” folder and it will show up in SC2 for you to use.

This last part of the guide will talk about a few unit management tips and tricks that many people aren't aware of.

Tip #1: Hotkey your forges on your nexus hotkey. This lets you easily access them and start your next upgrades by pressing your nexus hotkey, then selecting the forges by hitting tab once. Here’s a picture of what this looks like:



Tip #2: I don’t know about you guys, but there is nothing I hate more than hitting a warp cycle and then accidentally adding my warp gates to the control group. Good news – there is an easy way to remove them from the control group. Some of you already know this, no doubt, but if you press “ctrl+shift+left click” on a unit or building in a control group, it will remove all instances of that unit or building from the selected group. Here’s a series of pictures indicating what that looks like:



Step 1: Mouse over the warpgates in your selection group.



Step 2: Hold down ctrl + shift and left click any of the warpgate icons.



Step 3: Hurrah, they’re all gone! Now just rebind the control group (ctrl + 1, in this example) and everything is good to go.

Tip #3: Sometimes, you will want to do the opposite action from Tip #2 – instead of removing all of a certain type of unit from a control group, you’ll want to select all of a certain type of unit. In order to do that, all you have to do is press “ctrl+left click” on the unit / building you want and it will remove everything else from the control group. Here’s another set of pictures showing what that looks like:

Step 1: Box stuff.



Step 2: Hold down ctrl and left click the unit type you want to select.



Step 3: ?????????



Step 4: Profit.

Tip #4: by SC2John. Rebind guardian shield to 'r' to prevent accidentally casting it instead of FF or hold position. Also, rebind "Build Cybernetics Core" to 'r' for greater convenience.

Tip #5: by Tetoita. Rebind blink to a more convenient key, such as 'e' for example.

Tip #6: by ant-1. Remember to hide the menu hotkeys from the top of screen for greater vision, and you should make the hotkeys unclickable to prevent misclicks while microing your units. Also, disable the pop-up alerts on the left side of the screen for the same reasons.

Tip #7: You can change 'w' to a control group for your gateways instead of warp-in - this will allow you to still warp units in by pressing 'w' while also allowing you to conveniently check the progress of your cooldowns and morph additional gateways as soon as they finish.

Tip #8: You can hotkey your stargate on control group 6 and then rebind the production hotkeys for easier access. What I'm trying out now is: 'e' for build phoenix, 'r' for build void ray, and 't' for build carrier. All those are right underneath 6 and quite natural to reach.

My name is Matthew "RemarK" Kramer, a Grandmaster Protoss player on the NA server. I come from a competitive Halo background and have been playing Starcraft II since December 2010, starting out in bronze. If you want to learn more about me or support me, you can check out my hub thread here on teamliquid and comment! I am also a streamer (click here for my stream) - you can follow me on Twitter (@remarkiwa) for updates about when I will be going live or to further interact with me.

Thank you so much for reading and I hope this guide was helpful!