Possible improvements
---------------------

5. gray background for dark squares in 1-bit mode.  Do this like
xchess does.

12b. scoresheet text widget.  Current move should be highlighted.
Scoresheet could include comments or just have moves; latter is easier
to fit on screen.

16. Allow move typein from keyboard.  Maybe by typing into scoresheet,
maybe a separate pop-up dialog.  See also 64.  Could allow multiple
moves when in EditGame mode, to support X cut and paste from mail and
news.

20. Some way to back up, explore variations, then return to the main
line and restore moves we backed out.  Should also support exploring
side branches while loading a game file.  Push/pop buttons?  Button to
fork another xboard in same state as current one?

20a. Allow side branches to be remembered in game files (and
understood on LoadGame).  Use PGN variation notation.

46. LoadGame doesn't display ICS-style elapsed times on moves.  To do
this would require look-ahead or a parser change.  Either is doable
but ugly.  A benefit of look-ahead is that one could use it to pop up
comments along with the move they follow instead of on the next
forward step.

59. Make sure comment popup is wide enough considering font in use.
Assume 80 characters is enough?  [Not a problem in WinBoard.]

59a. Alternatively, allow wrap in comment popup.

62a. Support series of time controls as in recent gnuchess versions
(and real tournaments!).

62b. Perhaps (with gnuchess mods or some external help from xboard)
gnuchess could also support the kind of clock where you get K seconds
per move, plus a reserve of J seconds per game that is used when a
move takes more than K seconds.  The degenerate form of this with J=0
is desirable in itself.

64. Allow move typein in algebraic.  Could require coordinate notation
and highlight the ranks/files as typed, or could accept general
strings and parse with move parser.  Latter seems better.  Require a
special key to start, or any letter?  (Latter conflicts with xboard
shortcut keys, but would work on WinBoard.)

65. Animate piece while moving.  I have X code for this from Chris
Sears, but it works only with bitmap pieces, not pixmaps.

68. WinBoard has some features not in xboard:
68a. LoadGameOptions dialog             (good to add)
68b. SaveGameOptions dialog             (good to add)
68c. TimeControl dialog                 (good to add)
68g. Font dialog.			(leave out)
68h. Colors dialog.			(leave out)
68i. Board size on Options menu         (good to add)

69. xboard has some features not in WinBoard:
69c. Font size selection by pattern fill-in. (leave out)
69d. Alternate bitmaps specified at runtime. (good to add)

74. Observe/play multiple games, each with its own window.  Hard.

80. Clone command.  Saves current game to a file foo, then starts up
another copy of xboard with -lgf foo.  Should probably note current
state of some options and give command line flags to set them the same
way in child.  What about -ncp mode, though?  Might want that to be
different.  Would be nice to have a -moveNumber flag to position the
child to the same move number in the current game.

82. Optional highlights: (a) Square that was downclicked while making
a move. (b) From and to squares of last move (by opponent?).

85. Rolling across menu bar with mouse button down should scan through
menus.  How to do this with Athena widgets?  (Not a problem on
WinBoard.)

89. Notice when user has selected a large font in -titleInWindow mode,
and make sure the title line is wide enough for most messages; use
Small format with title on separate line if not.

91. Would be nice to have an option to overwrite save file instead of
appending.

95. "Have the clock indicate how long the computer/player has been
thinking for when the -st option is used. This should be how long for
the current move only." (Dino Dini)

96. "Have a menu option to give gnuchess the 'both' command to play
both sides. Useful for assessing which side is better off in a
position. I know that you can start another gnuchess, but that is very
wasteful of system resources." (Dino Dini) [may be hard]

97. "Have the ability to change the level of the gnuchess during a
game. For analysis purposes, sometimes it is useful to have the
computer think really hard about certain positions." (Dino Dini)

98. Reorganize the source and split it into more files.

107. Changing time control during a game could be made to work.
Current (WinBoard only) way of changing at start is suboptimal.

108. Could add search depth and time per move to (WinBoard)
TimeControl dialog.

117. Faster square drawing; precompute each piece/square color combo.
Mostly useful in WinBoard.

139. Be sure that "White's flag fell" and the like always go away when
they should; some gameMode changes may not be doing this.

140. LoadPosition needs better checking for invalid data.

142. xboard needs a real file chooser dialog.  Jeff Woolsey submitted
code to merge in the one from Ghostview, but said it works only on
X11R5 or later.  I have not yet tried his code or looked to see if it
could be made to work on X11R4.

144a. Current method of filtering out shouts, etc., doesn't work
fully, because the patterns insist on matching to the end of line.  If
you get a partial line, and something in it looks like a board, it
will match that.  There may be other bugs of this sort too.

145. eco popup, similar to book popup (Peter Chang).  Difficult due to
program-unfriendly format that gnuchess returns the eco info in (e.g.,
built-in pager even for gnuchessx), and bugs where too much info is
returned.

146. Bug: if you invoke EditTags and hit OK while a LoadGame is in
progress, the LoadGame stops with a bogus "end of game file".  This is
because the parser can only be working on one file or long string at a
time.  Similar problem if you try to build a game list while a game is
loading.  Could fix this (as well as 46 and 49) by having LoadGame
read in the whole game, then step through the in-memory movelist,
instead of calling the parser on each step.

147. Improve display of held pieces in bughouse mode, putting them
closer to the player's side of the board, and perhaps using icons (and
allowing dragging from the icons to drop a piece).  Actually, moving
the clocks would be beneficial too, so that it's easier to visually
associate the right clock with the right player when looking at two
boards during a bughouse match (with two copies of xboard running).
Maybe multiple window layouts should be user-selectable.

150. Keep track of castling availability, en-passant availability, and
FEN half-move clock (for 50-move rule), pass the availability
information to the move generator through the existing interface, and
load/save it in the FEN code.

151. Keep better track of which set of variant rules is in force
during a game, provide a way to choose the ruleset in Edit Game mode,
and load/save it as a PGN tag.  This would let us deal better with
things like wild castling (in shuffle variants where the king started
on d1 or d8), piece drops, and contact vs. non-contact mate (in
bughouse).

152. Generate the info file, man page, perhaps html, and perhaps even
the WinBoard help file from the same sources.  Right now,
substantially the same text is duplicated in three places.  This is
a huge pain in the neck.

153. WinBoard bug: the window is too small if the menu bar wraps.
This tends to happen if you are using large system fonts on a low
resolution screen and select size small.

157. Idea: if Zippy flags some number of times in a row and keeps
getting told the opponent is not out of time (presumably due to
timestamp/timeseal), he should issue an adjourn or abort.

158. DAV has problems using his rtelnet with xboard 3.6.0, whereas
3.5.0 worked.  Maybe he needs --enable-ptys?  He works at IBM so
presumably uses AIX.

159. xboard doesn't accept -periodicUpdates on the command line.

160. The xboard CTRL key flashback feature is bad in Analysis mode.
Flashing back throws away the analysis.

161. SIGINT doesn't work for local programs on Win32.  There is an
equivalent, GenerateConsoleCtrlEvent(CTRL_C_EVENT), but I haven't
gotten it to work thus far.  It seems that WinBoard and the chess
engine don't "have the same console"; indeed, neither has a console.

162. Supply a non-X Zippy for Unix.  Perhaps use the code from Klaus
Knopper.

163. Colors don't go on and off at the right places reliably.  Change
the patterns for chatter not to match to end of line, instead using a
flag to prevent stuff embedded in chatter from matching other
patterns.  This will also fix bug 144a above, where stuff embedded in
chatter can be recognized as matching another pattern if the end of
line hasn't reached us yet.  Change colors to turn off at the start of
the next line that does not begin with \.

164. Make xboard work when ICS prompt is turned off.  There may
already be bugs caused by not getting a prompt where we expect one,
such as immediately after the end of a move list.

165. More standard sizes, suitable for people with small screens.

166. Stretching bitmaps in WinBoard, to allow resizing. (?)

167. Alternative bitmaps loaded at runtime for WinBoard.  Bitmaps with
depth > 2 as in xboard xpm mode.

168. GUI for sound selection in WinBoard.

169. Upload Game on file menu?  This would upload the current game
moves into a scratch examined game on ICS.

170. Auto step every k seconds should be a general feature you can
turn on at any time, not just in LoadGame.  What should GUI be?

171. Displaying thinking in a separate window should be an option
available at all times when Show Thinking makes sense, not just in
analysis mode.  It should perhaps be orthogonal to analysis mode.

172. Should analysis window scroll instead of showing only the last
line?  There could be an extra checkbox to show all chess engine
output in it.

173. Animated piece dragging.  Install Chris Sears code in xboard,
extend to handle pixmaps.  How to do this in WinBoard?

174. More move history in message line, and/or make it a popup menu
anchor with all the moves available.


Old ideas I no longer think are so good:
---------------------------------------
3. human-human playing?  No, use ICS.

12a. analog clocks

12c. jail

20b. Alternative: Have a set of memories accessable via the menus into
which you can store, say, up to 10 positions (with all moves to that
point and the clock times). (Dino Dini)

21. Maybe make LoadPosition parser smarter: able to skip arbitrary
garbage before the position, able to tell when file doesn't contain a
position, able to read positions in other common styles.  (Tricky if
some use the opposite case convention.)

23. Maybe allow LoadGame from SetupPosition mode, or even ForceMoves
mode?  No, I think it's better to reset the position first.  A game
file can now include a starting position, which seems better than
loading position and subsequent moves separately.

26. After sending move to machine, wait for positive acknowledgement
or error message before proceeding; don't allow other events first.
This will fix some race conditions and obscure bugs, and allow some
new features---e.g., selecting Machine White when white is not on
move.

42. Could generate ICS-style elapsed times on each move for games
played against gnuchess.  This should probably be optional.  The same
option could suppress the times on moves from ICS, maybe.  (See also 46.)

43. Strength numbers from ICS are bogus if you use Backward/Forward.
They are nice to have, though.  Maybe xboard should generate correct
ones itself.  This could be done in non-ICS mode too.

49. It might be nicer to step slowly through movelists obtained from
the ICS oldmoves command, as with LoadGame, instead of jumping to the
end.

57. The move parser is slow on low-powered machines (e.g., VS2000).
This is annoying when parsing ICS "oldmoves" or "moves" output to
start observing a game.  Can it be speeded up?

63. Keyboard interface for moving pieces.  Ideas: Arrow keys move
selection highlight around.  Highlight not visible until first key is
pressed, then starts (where?).  <Enter> "picks up" piece, then arrow
keys again to select destination.  <Esc> aborts move (no touch move
here!).  <Enter> again to put down piece on new square.  Could maybe
have similar selection highlights on moves made with mouse.  In
EditPosition mode, <Insert> brings up piece menu and <Delete> empties
current square.  (These are PC keyboard keys.  What to use on vanilla
ASCII keyboard with X?)  Also, a-h keys could move highlight to a-h
file and 1-8 keys to 1-8th rank.

71. Allow restart after ICS logout instead of exiting?

72. Allow switching among ICS, NCP, GNU modes??

73. Rename noChessProgram mode?  Revamp command line options for 3
main modes.

81. Measure and warn of lag in ICS mode, or some other kind of
feedback to show the lag.

87. Optional long notation, at least on screen (e.g., Bc1-b2). (user
request)

141. Merge Kevin Ziegler's term-ification code into xboard?

109. Could maybe add the rest of the init options to the option
dialogs: initString, whiteString, blackString, first/second
Host/ChessProgram, remoteShell, telnetProgram, ics Host/Port,
useTelnet, gateway, debugMode, clockMode, etc.
