Any way to see typed text in Winboard/Xboard in ICS console?

[PulsarMike]

I often in the Xboard on Mac ICS console find myself talking in personal tells to someone. But Xboard by default doesn't print what I have typed. So if i forget at all what i was saying or cant remember if i mentioned this or that there is none of my own messages to be seen. In fact i've had to ask people what I told them if i was concerned i mis typed something like a year. Any setting that lets you see typed text? I tend to just do everything in main console and not use "New Chat".

[H.G.Muller]

You mean when you type something in the text entry at the bottom of the ICS window, it doesn't get automatically displayed in the 'ICS output' area above it? I hardly ever use XBoard to connect to an ICS, but I am pretty sure I should have noticed this when I was developing the feature. Isn't the ICS supposed to echo what you type, and is this not the reason that you normally see it? XBoard should display anything there the ICS coughs up, unless it is recognized as special (e.g. receiving a tell message from someone for which you have opened a chat; in that case it will be diverted to the appropriate chat window).

[PulsarMike]

With personal tells the only person the ICS sends a copy is the person you told something too. So you don't get to see what you said or get to make sure it didn't have a typo. Other forms of chat like shouts or kibitzes or channel tells are group chat so you would typically get a copy except in some rare cases like you kibitz but are not listening to kibitzes.

So i'm taking it there is no way to see what you types unless the ICS sends it back which it doesn't for personal tells? On ICC i can type /last username and see my chat history but i don't know of a way to do something like that on FICS.

Mike

[H.G.Muller]

It seems you are right. What is typed in the ICS input field is not automatically displayed in the ICS output pane. This is an oversight that I apparently never noticed. It should of course be quite easy to fix, by just calling the output routine from the <Enter> handler of the input field.

[PulsarMike]

It should of course be quite easy to fix, by just calling the output routine from the <Enter> handler of the input field.

That's what I do on my Lantern Chess client for ICC. But I did Lantern with datagrams. It doesn't work on FICS easy and i've decided i'd rather use different software, and I have liked XBoard so far. I had been using XBoard already for Pulsar on ICC.

If it got fixed is this something that would be fixed in both XBoard on Mac and WinBoard? For XBoard would it be a simple update or installer vs compile it or something?

Mike

[H.G.Muller]

In WinBoard it has always worked correctly. XBoard used to be dependent on the x-term window you started it from for the ICS communication, though, and that window automatically echos what you type. The separate ICS Interaction window was a recent addition of mine, to make it possible to react to mouse clicks in the ICS output with a context menu, like WinBoard does.

When I fix it it will be fixed in the source repository at the GNU Savannah website, and from there trickle on to the various Linux distros (like Debian) if we announce an official new release there. As for Mac, we used to host and update the XBoard OSX App ourselves, not necessarily in sync with official releases. But I am not sure if the person who was doing that (Joshua Pettus) still has a Mac. The source distro should come with the necessary build tools, however, and since you are a programmer you should be equiped to build it yourself from source.

[PulsarMike]

I do have a mac development machine and have the current XCode installed. I don't normally build any programs but my own on my mac i.e. projects i created.

I've tried to build a couple of things by running their make files but that hasn't worked out.

I'll give it a shot though.

[PulsarMike]

As for Mac, we used to host and update the XBoard OSX App ourselves, not necessarily in sync with official releases. But I am not sure if the person who was doing that (Joshua Pettus) still has a Mac.

Does OSX development just wait/depend on when OSX builds can be made? Updates to general source work on both windows and apple? Or is it more updates are possible if they use existing functions or edit functions but not create new UI?

The source distro should come with the necessary build tools, however, and since you are a programmer you should be equiped to build it yourself from source.

Hopefully if any questions I can ask. Still not sure what a build tool is other than a make file, that i don't write as i dont really write make files or edit them typically, or a developer studio like visual Studio or Xcode and a project file.

[PulsarMike]

In WinBoard it has always worked correctly.

I still have windows on one computer i keep hooked up to TV and it has Winboard 4.4.3 installed and i checked and you are correct. The typed text displays in Winboard.

XBoard used to be dependent on the x-term window you started it from for the ICS communication, though, and that window automatically echos what you type. The separate ICS Interaction window was a recent addition of mine, to make it possible to react to mouse clicks in the ICS output with a context menu, like WinBoard does.

I remember the old XBoard 2.2.6 by Tim Mann. It used terminal for it's console and had a separate input window. I wouldn't use that old one today on servers like FICS or back then. Do appreciate the ics interaction console and its a part of what makes it useable for me now for something other than a bot.

[H.G.Muller]

The 'back-end' is shared between WinBoard and XBoard, so functionality added there, under control of command-line options, will automatically apply to both. The UIs are completely separate for Windows on one hand, and Linux / OSX on the other. The difference between OSX and Linux is mostly in the code that decides how to handle signals that OSX sends when an already running application is invoked again on another 'document' (which then must make XBoard fork off another instance) and such, and to make sure the native OSX menu bar is kept in sync with the 'virtual' GTK menu bar. This is handled by a few #ifdef OSX in the XBoard front-end.

Build tools on Linux also include a 'configure' file, which is a script responsible for generating the Makefile. And when we build from a git version rather than an officially released tar ball, we have to do ./autogen.sh first. (This is part of the release procedure.) I don't know how it is done on Mac. In the source tree there is a directory 'osxapp' which contains some OSX-specific stuff, but I don't know if there is an XCode project file amongst that. You would certainly need to have the GTK and GTK-OSX libraries installed.

[PulsarMike]

This works in winboard, it's entering the repo for Linux so i've moved any questions now to compiling to a new topic in the development and bug fixing room for anyone who wants to check on this further viewtopic.php?f=19&t=54394

[PulsarMike]

When I fix it it will be fixed in the source repository at the GNU Savannah website, and from there trickle on to the various Linux distros (like Debian) if we announce an official new release there. As for Mac, we used to host and update the XBoard OSX App ourselves, not necessarily in sync with official releases. But I am not sure if the person who was doing that (Joshua Pettus) still has a Mac. The source distro should come with the necessary build tools, however, and since you are a programmer you should be equiped to build it yourself from source.

Is it proper to ask now, is it fixed? I tried to move this issue on the mac compile to the bug fixing forum but got no response to my two questions. So is it fixed? is there a change log i can consult to notice when it's updated? I found in one of my program's, lantern chess, the change log was a good place to let users know what was in each version http://www.lanternchess.com/changelog.htm

Also https://savannah.gnu.org/ seems like a source repo like github. Do you guys have a specific url? are there any more specific to mac?

I have found Xboard satisfactory over the last week. I only engaged in personal tells once and i could remember what i said. It would still help for me to be able to review the record but the conversation didn't last that long and it was no great disadvantage. It works fine for play. One might like the names on the board more prominently and other board information to be more prominent but that wasn't a great difficulty. It did crash once placing my cursor in the input area(which also gave it focus, i was in another program prior) but that is the only crash i have experienced in perhaps 100 launches. And tapping in text area you can hit something on keyboard etc its a wild west of sorts. There does appear to be an issue with copy paste in xboard on mac that i have not had a chance to confirm on windows if its an issue as windows box has been off. I turned it off when i got a program i ran on it to run under WINE on mac. But copy and paste works very poorly with what is paste being cut off early by any number of special characters like an a quote mark or something say jack's and it cuts off on the '''. Makes it very hard to copy and paste but i will try to paste into gmail and do the remove formatting and see if that fixes it. This is not a deal breaker issue however as i can if i care to do multiple copies of the text till it copies and also just paste a link with some text i type in.

Edit if the c++ code is limited to the 256 character char set my preferred behavior on copy and paste is the material be normalized to somehow display even if special characters appear in characters outside that set. It can handle the alphabet.

[H.G.Muller]

Sorry, I was very busy, and had not visited this forum for more than a week. I finally got to patching this in the XBoard source, where I had to finish another patch thatw as only half-finished first. I uploaded the patch to my on-line repository at http://hgm.nubati.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi (v4.9.x branch, which is the one I am actively developing).

I hadn't worked on XBoard for such a long time that I forgot my ssh password for GNU Savannah (or the procedure to get a new one); usually it never asked for that, but I guess it now thinks I was away too long... So I did not manage to push it to the git repository at savannah yet.

That source should work for both Mac and Linux; we have no separate sources for those, just some #ifdef macros in the source that would disable the gtk_osx-specific stuff on Linux. BTW, a plain Linux compile of XBoard should work on Mac too, but it would feel a bit less native (menu bar inside the window, etc.) I don't know what exactly the building recipe for the OSX version is. On Linux I do just do

./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

and that's it.

[PulsarMike]

Thank you for getting back. I myself have not checked the forum in last week or so. I'll look into this. But i've posted in another bug now in the bug fix forum this time on copy and paste in xboard.

[Josh Pettus]

Hi, Sorry it's been a while since I've looked at this page. I couldn't even remember my log in :/ I don't even remember how to upload to savanah either. And it's true, I don't even have a proper mac anymore. I can probably get my old laptop running for a short while before it crashes. Enough to make another build, But I don't do any real work on it.

Yes the normal, linux style build will work just fine on OSX. That said, there was a build script to automatically make the OSX bundle. It's rather amateurish as I never could figure out GTK2's jhbuild stuff or building scripts, but it does work. You can take a look at the configuration file and its on the bottom section. Trigger it you have to include --enable-osxapp as a configuration flag. And will trigger when you do "make osxapp" There were a slew of dependencies to make it work which we never tested for, and requires to be installed from macports.

Most important it required dylbbundler to bundle GTK2's massive amount of libraries in the bundle. For the app you will want to use the quartz version of GTK2, and a quite a few others. I'll have to see if I still have my notes somewhere, but most of them you can probably figure out by looking at that script section.