Evert wrote:Count me among those who would vastly prefer a display with a palette to drag pieces from. I find any interface that requires me to do a secondary click+drag annoying, which probably has a lot to do with using a trackpad (primary click+drag is less annoying, probably having to do with using my right hand to operate the trackpad).
What do you mean by 'primary' and 'secondary' click? Is that left and right mouse button?
A separate "edit position" dialog would probably be my preference, given that it solves issues with where you would put the window with position options (probably below the board, or flush to one of the sides unless the user has specified a position for the window) and it simplifies the interface in the sense that the board window doesn't change behaviour.
This is one of the (first) things I tried, and it did not work nice at all. Because of the problem you mention; the extra dialog tends to eclipse parts of the board where you want to place pieces. And even if a place can be found for it where it would not eclipse anything, this then tends to make the distance you have to travel between grabbing a piece and placing it unnecessarily large. It was really annoying.
This is what drove me to an 'internal' piece palette, where the pieces you want to select for placing are already on the board itself, much closer to were you actually want them. There of course is still some eclipsing in the sense that the pallette pieces are now on squares where you might want to place other pieces, but in practice this is very rare. The large majority of chess positions have pieces on the back rank only because they were never moved, and still in their original location. Except for (Q-side) castling, but it feels quite natural to just place the pieces that start between King and Rook first. It hardly ever happens that a group of pieces needs to be permuted cyclically from where they start initially.
Popping up a context menu or dialog after having indicated the square worked more conveniently that a static 'pallette dialog', as you don't care whether the board gets covered by it in that case. I still experienced that as annoying, because it cannot always appear in the same position relative to the mouse pointer, because of constraints by the edge of the screen.
I fully appreciate the complication of making this work with the vast number of pieces XBoard allows for.
Cycling through available pieces by clicking repeatedly is an acceptable alternative, provided there is a way to reverse the direction with a modifier key, and possibly another modifier key to switch sides.
Indeed, the sweep-selection mode was invented for efficient use with a (multi-button) mouse, and I had not given enough attention to how it would work on a touch pad. This is why I added the multi-click version as an alternative in v4.9.
The modifier key had not occurred to me yet, but sounds like a very good idea: Shift + rightClick (or middle click) to 'decrement' the piece type. Which with sweep selection is possible by sweeping in the upward direction, to immediately access the black pieces.
What do you mean by 'switch side'? Color-flip the clicked piece? Shift + right-click initially already places a black Pawn instead of a white one.
([Edit] Oh, and I nearly forgot about this. But for people that dislike using keyboard modifiers, a double-click on the piece you grab for moving will subsequently copy that piece, rather than move it)
My typical use case for setting up a position is for creating a test position to test something. As such, I usually don't want to edit an existing position.
Well, it depends on what kind of things you want to test. For middle-game positions the move and copy dragging of pieces from the pallette position is usually the fastest way for me by far. I only use the possibility to place new pieces when I want to set up late end-game positions, to try out mating potential. I wonder whether it wouldn't be better to leave on the Kings, in the case of 'Clear Board', as you would virtually always need those.
That being said, it's not at the top of the list of (minor) annoyances I have with XBoard. Addressing it also does nothing for WinBoard, which I personally don't care about
I am not sure why you make the destinction WinBoard/XBoard here. The sweep selection works the same in both. It is true that I never got to implement context menus in the GTK version, so that the -pieceMenu option would not work in XBoard to pop up the old-style context menu.
(as an aside, have you considered releasing the GTK build of XBoard for Windows as an alternative to WinBoard proper?)
Now that XBoard has reached, and perhaps even surpassed WinBoard, this is indeed not a totally crazy idea. One drawback is that to use GTK and the Cairo plot library on Windows you would need dozens of megabytes in libraries, killing the light-weight character for which I like WinBoard so much.
