Newbie Xboard Question

[gatoruss]

I have been fiddling around with xboard, running it on W11, using the windows subsystem linus (wsl2). I am configuring it for use as a game viewer.

Whenever I start the program, there is a startup message (announcement) regarding what happens when one "right clicks" on a menu. The announcement disappears when one clicks on a board square. I am looking for a way to disable this dialogue/announcement, to no avail. I notice, however, that the announcement DOES NOT appear in winboard at startup.

Any thoughts on where how the announcement can be disabled?

Thanks in advance!

[hgm]

In the settings file there is a string option -messageSuppress, and a non-empty value for that would suppress the appearance of this message. Normally the start of XBoard or the use of this feature should assign a value to this option, so that it would only appear on the first-time use.

But it seems in your case XBoard does not save its setting. So the option remains in its initial (empty) state, and each time you start XBoard it then displays the message.

[gatoruss]

Thanks for your reply!

In my .xboardrc file, there is the following line:

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"-suppressMessage ""

As I understand your reply, I should change this line to something like:

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"-suppressMessage "something"

Am I getting warm?

Seriously, thank you for your time.

[gatoruss]

That did the trick!

Thanks again!

[gatoruss]

Well I jumped the gun. It worked a few times, and now the announcement/message is back. Yet, .xboardrc contains:

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"-suppressMessage "something"

[gatoruss]

In my wsl distro the is a file called:

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"\\wsl.localhost\Debian\etc\xboard\xboard.conf"

In this file there is the following code, I found the following code:

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; Anouncement to make at startup
;
-startupMessage {Right-clicking menu item or
dialog text pops up help on it}

That file cannot be edited. As an experiment, I placed the code below into .xboardrc and when I opened xboard "false" was in the popup message and the next time I opened xboard the original message had returned.

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-startupMessage false

[hgm]

The way XBoard settings work is that the xboard.conf 'master settings file' in etc/xboard/ contains a -settingsFile option which causes it to read the current user's .xboardrc settings file. Which will then overrule the settings in the master settings file, and also becomes the place where XBoard saves its settings on exit. So it should always be sufficient to change the -suppressMessage option in .xboardrc.

But you mentioned you configured XBoard as geme viewer, and what you see might be a result of how exactly you did that. Because one settings file can refer to another for overruling earlier specified option settings, the settings that are actually operational might not always be in the place where you think they are.

[gatoruss]

Thank you for your reply.

I am running the following bash command to start xboard:

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xboard -ncp -boardSize "Large" -xautoflip -flip -lgf mygamefile -lgi -mode EditGame

I have also tried:

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xboard -ncp -boardSize "Large" -xautoflip -flip -lgf mygamefile -lgi -mode EditGame -messageSuppress "something"

But neither opens xboard without the startup announcement.

It is interesting that after the first time I changed .xboardrc to change

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-messageSuppress ""

to

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-messageSuppress "something"

, xboard opened without the startup anouncement, but every time after that xboard opened with the startup announcement ntwithstanding that .xboardrc contained

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-messageSuppress "something"

.

[hgm]

OK, I was wrong. (It was a long time ago I implemented this...) To suppress the message -messageSuppress should not be just anything, but a sub-string of the message you want to suppress.

[gatoruss]

Thank you! I added the line below to .xboardrc did the trick, and .xboard did not save over this setting upon exiting. Thanks, again!

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-messageSuppress "Right-clicking menu item or dialog text pops up help on it"