Count me as another vote FOR diagonal movement, at least for those who want it. Three sane ways to handle it on a laptop are (a) use an external keyboard (or a gaming laptop) with a number pad; (b) support Nethack-style "hjklyubn" controls as an alternative to wasd; (c) use wasd but remap qezx for diagonal movement.
On an unrelated note, I am just trying the alpha for teh first time (v0.1.3) and auto-explore ('c') got stuck in an infinite loop going back and forth in a hallway near a corner (I guess it viewed two alternatives as equally attractive targets for exploration). AFAICT there is no way to break out of such a loop? No keystrokes I tried seemed to work, so I had to quit out of the game.