Best Chess GUI ?

Discussion of anything and everything relating to chess playing software and machines.

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fishpov
Posts: 113
Joined: Sat Mar 07, 2015 6:05 pm

Best Chess GUI ?

Post by fishpov »

What is the best chess GUI for testing engines?
I use Fritz 16 GUI but you can't enter unconventional positions.
Arena is from 2015 and Lucas Chess maybe or others ?
A GUI which also allows you to automate series of tests

Thanks
Hai
Posts: 693
Joined: Sun Aug 04, 2013 1:19 pm

Re: Best Chess GUI ?

Post by Hai »

fishpov wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 8:02 pm What is the best chess GUI for testing engines?
I use Fritz 16 GUI but you can't enter unconventional positions.
Arena is from 2015 and Lucas Chess maybe or others ?
A GUI which also allows you to automate series of tests

Thanks
BanksiaGUI
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Fritz 20
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Graham Banks
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Location: Auckland, NZ

Re: Best Chess GUI ?

Post by Graham Banks »

I use ChessGUI because it meets all of my testing requirements in a way that no other GUI does.
gbanksnz at gmail.com
matejst
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Full name: Boban Stanojević

Re: Best Chess GUI ?

Post by matejst »

In a related topic: Peter Schaefer has restarted working on his GUI and database software, José.

It is, of course, not suited for engine testing, but is a very correct GUI, and improvements are made almost daily.

You can download it here: https://github.com/peteschaefer/jose. There are explanations about the new features at the bottom of the page.
Modern Times
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Re: Best Chess GUI ?

Post by Modern Times »

I use CuteChess GUI, the best by far for the engine testing I do. It supports concurrency, a hugely useful feature, which means multiple matches at the same time from just the one GUI instance. The matches run in their own tabs, kind of like an Excel spreadsheet. There is also the cli version.
peter
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Re: Best Chess GUI ?

Post by peter »

Fritz has the well to edit, import games to and merge engine- books in its own format, and it's the one and only GUI that works with EloStatTS (Frank Schubert).
Shredder is another one very stable GUI from one of the authors of UCI- protocol (Stefan Meyer-Kahlen) and writes fine tables of results of test suites.
Arena also is one of the most many-sided GUIs to me too and it's free, I like especially the automatic analysis of .pgn- as well as of .epd- collections in both directions (forward and backward), for both sides (Black and White) as well as for one side only.
CuteChess GUI to me is very useful to set up eng-eng-matches with, especially as for several concurrencies of games, regards
Peter.
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hgm
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Re: Best Chess GUI ?

Post by hgm »

I always use WinBoard (or XBoard on Linux).
Werewolf
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Re: Best Chess GUI ?

Post by Werewolf »

Hai wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 8:28 pm
fishpov wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 8:02 pm What is the best chess GUI for testing engines?
I use Fritz 16 GUI but you can't enter unconventional positions.
Arena is from 2015 and Lucas Chess maybe or others ?
A GUI which also allows you to automate series of tests

Thanks
BanksiaGUI
ChessOK Aquarium
Deep Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro Premium
Fritz 20
At first I thought you'd just made a mistake, but then I checked on Chessbase's website and Fritz 19 is no longer available, maybe Fritz 20 is incoming?
Hai
Posts: 693
Joined: Sun Aug 04, 2013 1:19 pm

Re: Best Chess GUI ?

Post by Hai »

Werewolf wrote: Sat May 17, 2025 6:09 pm
Hai wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 8:28 pm
fishpov wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 8:02 pm What is the best chess GUI for testing engines?
I use Fritz 16 GUI but you can't enter unconventional positions.
Arena is from 2015 and Lucas Chess maybe or others ?
A GUI which also allows you to automate series of tests

Thanks
BanksiaGUI
ChessOK Aquarium
Deep Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro Premium
Fritz 20
At first I thought you'd just made a mistake, but then I checked on Chessbase's website and Fritz 19 is no longer available, maybe Fritz 20 is incoming?
I will buy it and run it on my MacBook MAX.
20.05.2025
But you can buy it probably some hours sooner I guess.
ot7096
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat Sep 13, 2025 4:01 pm
Full name: Gu Xu

Re: Best Chess GUI ?

Post by ot7096 »

You can use ChessMD ( https://chessmd.org ), the GUI has command line interaction with Engine showed in real time.


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