Premove, move history, and seeking

[rigao]

I suppose I'm being annoying right now. But I want to make more suggestions. Of course, a change in the code is on the way so it won't be advisable to change those things right now, but maybe they can go to the todo list

First of all, about the premove. I don't quite like how it is implemented in xboard. When you want to pre-take one of your pieces, it just select the other piece, it does not take it in advance. And this is frustrating, as I only use premove in two situations: a) when I don't have enough time, and just move for the sake of winning in time or b) when I suppose my opponent will take one of my pieces, in which case, I want to pre-take it. In the b case scenario, it has no drawbacks, as you will only make this move only if your opponent actually take. In other cases, your move is invalid so you can't make an error. In the implementation, case b just doesn't exist.

The best implementation I've seen so far is when you pre-move, and you can take your own pieces, but if you just simply click on any of your pieces, then the pre-move disappears. This way, if you select one piece (moving with click-click rather than drag and drop) and then another, by mistake you pre-take, but then you just clik another time your taken piece, and you can move it right away.

I don't know if I make myself clear. I hope you understand.

About move history, it is not a big deal, but, can it scroll down automatically so you always see the move where the position stands?

And about seeking, is not only for that, but will help a lot. When I'm in FICS, I open the FICS box to input commands (all works well), and suppose I seek like this (as I usually do):

seek 3 0 rated white 1700-2300

then some1 picks the seek, I play a game, and after that, a rather annoying message asking me where to save the game (ok, I guess it will be some default base where it saves games, and as I told it to save my games, it asks me where to). I save it, and then, to seek another time, I need to write everything down again. I just can't click the up arrow to get to the last command input, as I do in terminals (or in jin). When I do this in the terminal where xboard is open, it doesn't work either... It will be great if the program remember 3 or 4 at least of my last commands, so i don't need to rewrite it.

As for today, I think I'm not going to ask anything else Thx you very much just for considering what I said.

[H.G.Muller]

Being prompted for a filename on auto-save is an option I think. It can be turned off.

Having line-editing possibilities and recalling old input lines for XBoard is on the to-do list (as WinBoard already has this).

The pre-move is tricky. What you say makes sense, but a lot of people might be used to the way it happens now, and switching it might lead to the entering of a lot of unintended pre-moves. So I guess if we do this, it can be at best optional (e.g. -preCapture true|false).