In alsamixer, many options are bound to function keys. These are used by my window manager, so I cannot use them in my terminal. The alsamixer man page mentions that 'gnome-terminal' cannot use function keys either.

I noticed from the "Help" screen that many function keys have non-function-key alternatives, for instance instead of F6 I can press "s". This is great, but there is one remaining problem: The legend (at the top of the alsamixer screen) labels commands preferentially with their function-key bindings. This includes "Help" which is labelled with "F1". Seeing this, users are likely to assume that "F1" is the only binding for "Help". But it turns out that one can also access "Help" with "?" and "H". This can be learned by reading the man page or pressing keys experimentally, but it would be nice if "Help" was just labeled with either "?" or "H", as that allows people who are unable to use function keys to easily access the help screen and then see that alternate (non-function-key) bindings exist for other commands as well.

As an aside, it seems odd to map "q" to "increase left volume".