Winboard Forum

In previous versions of xboard I could resize the board window and I could make it as small or large I wanted. The window would adjust it self to keep the x-y axis ratio stable and contain only the board. This seems to have changed in the current version since when I try to reduce the board, after some point, the window resizes only the y-axis while the x-axis doesn't get any smaller. I assume this is because the new version does not allow the white and black clocks to be hidden or resized as before. The problem however is that if I want to make the window very small then there is an empty space on the right of the board (see the attached screenshot). This is quite annoying when working on a small laptop because it wastes a lot of precious screen space.

Is there a way to get the old behaviour?

Thanks

This is an unwanted effect of the switch to the GTK widget set, which we haven't figured out yet how to avoid: the clocks refuse to shrink below their initial width. There is an easy work-around, though, which is to make sure the clocks are small enough at startup. This can be done with the aid of the command-line argument -size. E.g.

xboard -size 33

The possibility to size XBoard by dragging the window edges is relatively new anyway; before the switch from pixmaps to SVG graphics using the -size argument was the only way to affect the size. Even in the Xaw version (which does allow shrinking of the clocks) the current interactive sizing is not really as it should be (e.g. as it is in WinBoard), because it only affects the board, and not the fonts to go with it.

As the -size option is remembered in the settings file, you only have to do set it once to a satisfactory value.

Your workaround works well.

Thanks for all the excellent work in developing xboard

By the way, my very best wishes for the new year