A solution to all the items and tools I constantly have to switch out! My suggestion for a smarter, easier, hotbar is simply to integrate multiple slots under one hotkey.
Yep, sounds useful alright. How about also allowing for those additional slots to collapse when you hover mouse over your equipped item for about 2 seconds or so? Eventually, scrolling, also from Gmod/Half-Life 2. In Gmod/Half-Life 2 you can pretty much scroll the weapons in weapon selector from top to bottom with mouse scroll wheel and each time you reach end of main weapon category, it automatically switches to next one - At least, I think that’s how it worked like, might be remembering it wrong. Either way, I don’t think making this keyboard shortcut exclusive would be a good idea. It would be great as an option, even main one, but you should be able to control that with more options/change modes for how the smart selector works from game settings.