PyChess - the greatest chess interface for Linux

[royb]

Oh, now I see it. Thanks!

[Lanzo]

Any way to paste an FEN string into Pychess to have it analyzed?

I see it can read an FEN from a file, but it is much more convenient to copy a FEN and paste it (less work and no file clutter to worry about over time with lots of FENs just sitting around in a directory).

Same really for a single PGN file -- I usually paste them in rather than download the PGN especially if it is just a single game I'm interested in analyzing.

You can paste a FEN in "Game"->"Enter game notation" into the textbox.

Bajusz, I am an ardent admirer of PyChess but there is one fault which I can't help but expose. It does not support Bughouse, which is rather unfortunate. Any chance of it getting Bughouse support soon?

[gbtami]

I'm glad that the development was picked up again. For a long period there was only a buggy version. I helped do the Romanian translations several years ago.

Telling the truth the git version has serious stability problems too. Long years ago we made a wrong decision and choose gtk threads_enter()/threads_leave() usage instead of idle_add(). Now this is clear that several freeze/crash is rooting to this reason. We started to fix this in idle_add branch, but this work needs time. PyChess from git master is not so bad, but random freeze/crash can occur especially in long FICS sessions.

[gbtami]

Any way to paste an FEN string into Pychess to have it analyzed?

I see it can read an FEN from a file, but it is much more convenient to copy a FEN and paste it (less work and no file clutter to worry about over time with lots of FENs just sitting around in a directory).

Same really for a single PGN file -- I usually paste them in rather than download the PGN especially if it is just a single game I'm interested in analyzing.

You can paste a FEN in "Game"->"Enter game notation" into the textbox.

Bajusz, I am an ardent admirer of PyChess but there is one fault which I can't help but expose. It does not support Bughouse, which is rather unfortunate. Any chance of it getting Bughouse support soon?

I'v started to work on it. It's rather limited yet.

[hgm]

PyChess is now officially the greatest chess client for Linux to ever acquire existence, and one now might conclude that it has surpassed xboard by all standards.

OK, I'll bite.

What makes this 'offcial'? That you think so?

I don't want to say anything negative about PyChess. It is great there is a variety of GUIs, and PyChess seems a very good one, which furthermore pays attention to Chess variants.

But 'surpasses by all standards' is a very strong claim. And by my standards the screenshot you show isn't very impressive at all. It seems to subdivide the screen in a completely wrong way, wasting lots of space besides the board, and then clipping the interesting information (like move history) in a tiny corner. This is probably more user error than the fault of PyChess. But why post such and ugly screenshot that subverts the point you want to make in the text?

By my standards this screenshot, of XBoard performing a similar task, looks much better:


For side-by-side comparison:

[Lanzo]

PyChess is now officially the greatest chess client for Linux to ever acquire existence, and one now might conclude that it has surpassed xboard by all standards.

OK, I'll bite.

What makes this 'offcial'? That you think so?

I don't want to say anything negative about PyChess. It is great there is a variety of GUIs, and PyChess seems a very good one, which furthermore pays attention to Chess variants.

But 'surpasses by all standards' is a very strong claim. And by my standards the screenshot you show isn't very impressive at all. It seems to subdivide the screen in a completely wrong way, wasting lots of space besides the board, and then clipping the interesting information (like move history) in a tiny corner. This is probably more user error than the fault of PyChess. But why post such and ugly screenshot that subverts the point you want to make in the text?

I admit that the screenshot I posted is horribly oversized and the panels are slightly misplaced, so here is a better one;

[gbtami]

The board widget and side panels are placed in a paned widget. A paned widget draws a separator between the two child widgets and a small handle that you can drag to adjust the division!

[hgm]

This is what I suspected. So to make that the screenshot no longer sucks, it is really the vertical separation that should be drawn to the left, to squeeze out the empty spaces left and right of the board.

But even then, I would still not say it looks any better than the XBoard screenshot, though. At least, not to my eye.

[styx]

is there a way to set up a position in pychess? otherwise xboard should be a little bit better, although it's still not that user friendly

[Lanzo]

This is what I suspected. So to make that the screenshot no longer sucks, it is really the vertical separation that should be drawn to the left, to squeeze out the empty spaces left and right of the board.

But even then, I would still not say it looks any better than the XBoard screenshot, though. At least, not to my eye.

To your worthless eye, even Kate Upton doesn't look any better than a horse suffering from rabies.