Recent xboards

[bob]

Just a quick note. I rarely fiddle with xboard, just let it run on ICC. But the more recent versions look really good to me. The "show engine output" option is far better than trying to fit everything in the small move window in the xboard display. Only quibble is the "inverted output" (most recent line is at top, rather than bottom) but that is not a major issue. Otherwise, damn fine job, HGM...

[hgm]

Thanks Bob!

The bottom-up display of the engine-output was not my invention (Alessandro Scotti had already implemented it that way in WinBoard before I appeared on the scene; I just ported it toXBoardthe way he had designed it). But if you think about it, it actually has some advantage over doing it the other way around:

The most recent line, which is usually the one you are interested in, is now always in the same place. When you would display top-down, it would either move out of view at the bottom (now the lowest depth moves out of view). And if you would make it auto-scroll to keep the last line in view, the lines would first remain static, the most recent one being printed ever lower, until it reaches the bottom, and then itwould stay there, and the other lines would start moving up. That makes for less quiet viewing.

Note that you can right-click the PV lines in that window, on which moving the mouse pointer vertically with the right button still down, you will be able to step through that PV on the chess board.

[bob]

Thanks Bob!

The bottom-up display of the engine-output was not my invention (Alessandro Scotti had already implemented it that way in WinBoard before I appeared on the scene; I just ported it toXBoardthe way he had designed it). But if you think about it, it actually has some advantage over doing it the other way around:

The most recent line, which is usually the one you are interested in, is now always in the same place. When you would display top-down, it would either move out of view at the bottom (now the lowest depth moves out of view). And if you would make it auto-scroll to keep the last line in view, the lines would first remain static, the most recent one being printed ever lower, until it reaches the bottom, and then itwould stay there, and the other lines would start moving up. That makes for less quiet viewing.

Note that you can right-click the PV lines in that window, on which moving the mouse pointer vertically with the right button still down, you will be able to step through that PV on the chess board.

I'm an "old dog" and you know what "new tricks" means.

In any case, most of my "watching" via "tail -f log.nnn" which scrolls with the most recent line at the bottom. But since the output window clears between searches in xboard, the inverted scrolling seems to be perfectly OK, once I got used to not looking at the bottom line.