How to make hot keys character specific.
 

Is there a way to make key bindings specific to each character on your account?

I'm running into issues while playing alts and having to completely reset or revamp my hotkeys each time I swap a character.

I think the only way is to create copies of your client and name them for specific characters. It's a bit of a pain but it works.

Make a batch file (or multiple) that swaps out eqclient.ini for the appropriate one

copy c:\p99\someone-eqclient.ini c:\p99\eqclient.ini /y
c:\p99\eqgame.exe patchme

I'm not up on batch scripting but I'll puzzle it out. Is that the jist of the script there? Also will it automatically pull whenever I go to the character select screen or do I need to relaunch the client each time I swap characters?

You would probably have to relaunch the client each time you swapped characters.

Yea that was something I was trying to avoid. The time it takes to relaunch the client I can just reprogram the keys but I get the fact that relaunching would essentially be easier.

I don't remember classic being like this? Is this a little bug with the emulator server or has it always been this way and I have a crappy memory?

Always been this way. The eqclient file which stores keybinds is computer specific and the file that loads when you load into game unless you make multiple instances of the game files and use different shortcuts to start it.