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I'm trying to improve my macromanagment speed and I recognize that I never use the Alarm sound cues. There is a hotkey to jump to the last cue, but I can't quite figure out how it works. You can jump to the last alarm with Spacebar and an alarm can be if a unit was created, you were attacked somewhere, minerals or vespin gas resources are finished in one location, etc.

My first impression was that the alarm system works like a stack. The newest event will be put on top on the stack. If you press Spacebar, you will get to the top of the stack, then to the second element and so on. I thought that if I jumped to an element it would get pushed from the stack and I wouldn't be able to get to it anymore when pressing Spacebar. But it appears to loop. That means if I press Spacebar a couple of times and see the latest events and then do some other stuff, when I come back the same events are still in the stack.

Has anyone used the spacebar hotkey frequently and figured out how it works? Thanks!

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The alarm cue hotkey will always move you to the latest alarm event, then cycle through the next recent alarm. Alerts will not be removed from the stack once you visit them, only after the alarm condition has passed.

Additionally, user Aequitas has some good advice on this question from 2016:

While this answer is correct, I'd advise against using this method generally. What if just as you push space, you get a different alert? Then you end up being in the wrong spot and wasting time. Set Camera Locations for important places, such as your main, nat and third. You can double tap control groups for most other regions of interest, otherwise just click on the map.

I would also recommend only using this hotkey to quickly move to a location with an alarm that you could not otherwise move to, such as in the event of an unexpected attack.

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    What do you mean by "only after the alarm condition has passed."?
    – Paul Erlenmeyer
    Commented May 22, 2019 at 15:42
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    @PaulErlenmeyer the "alarm condition" is the specific set of circumstances that initially caused the alarm. In your question, you identify some of these conditions: unit creation, being attacked, and completion of a mineral task. After any of these conditions no longer exist, they will not be accessible again through the hotkey. If you resolve the alarm as you cycle with the hotkey, they shouldn't be visible again- but if you just view the alarm, it will still 'be there' even if you already viewed the alarm.
    – Nick S
    Commented May 22, 2019 at 15:49
  • Last question unsanswered is: say there you start to cycle through ur stack. U stop cycling through it some point. You wait a certain time and start cycling again. Some new events happened during that time. Where will you land? At the point you left of last time or at the top of the stack. What happened to the events you already cycled through. Do you have to see them again? And what is the time where it resets the timer (?). Say that no new events were added. You cycle through some of the events and stop. You wait a minute. Press space again. Where will you land?
    – Paul Erlenmeyer
    Commented May 24, 2019 at 7:42
  • There is no timer. The only criterion used to determine if an event is in the stack is if it has an active alarm condition. The most recent event to currently have an alarm condition will always be at the top of the stack. If no new alarms occur, you will continue to cycle through the stack, regardless of how long you wait.
    – Nick S
    Commented May 24, 2019 at 17:41

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