The WinBoard Gold Pack 4.4.0 For the ultimate WinBoard experience!

Customizing WinBoard through Shortcuts

The most convenient way to run invoke WinBoard is usually through PSWBTM, as this combines an easy way to select the engine with a large choice of engines. A viable alternative for things you do very often (e.g. play on FICS, or play your own engine on ICC) is to use a shortcut. Such a shortcut hardly offers any flexibility, as it always starts WinBoard with exactly the same combination of options. But it does allow you to start this combination with a single mouse click, which can be convenient for something you do frequently. And the WinBoard menus offer you a possibility to tailor some settings later.

If you browse to the WinBoard directory of this package (~\WinBoard), starting from "My Computer" on the desk top, You will see a number of black-knight icons. Except for the one marked "winboard" these are all shortcuts (recognizable from the small arrow in their lower left). They were defined as examples for how shortcuts can be used to ease some common tasks.

A good example to look how this works at is the "PGN viewer" shortcut. Double-click this, and you will see WinBoard pop up. Only the WinBoard main and move-history window will be there. Compare this to what you get when you click the winboard icon itself (i.e. not a shotcut): this will pop up the start-up dialog first, where you would have to tick that you want to use WinBoard to view or edit games only, after which it would come up in the default mode, with game history, engine output and evaluation graph all open up. (Unless you changed this default after downloading.) So to get into the same mode as was pre-programmed in the "PGN Viewer" shortcut, you would first have to close these auxiiary windows (in the "Mode" menu). So the shortcut does save quite some effort.

In a shortcut you can include any command-line options with the command that invokes WinBoard (in the target field that you see when you right-click the shortcut, and select "properties"). The shortcuts in this package are all based on the use of "indirection" file arguments. That means that the actual arguments for, say, the "PGN Viewer" icon, are collected into a file "viewer.ini". The only option on the command-line in the shortcut is then "@viewer". Such a name preceded by a '@' sign is interpreted by WinBoard as the name of an .ini file (in this case viewer.ini), which is then read to get the actual option settings. This allows for far more options than can be put in the target line of the shortcut, and allows you to easily modify the options with a text editor like NotePad, rather than in the cramped confines of the shortcut properties dialog.

So when you want to change the settings of the shortcuts, you only have to change the contents of the corresponding .ini file. The shortcuts themselves only contain

in their target field, where the twiddle stands for the path where you installed the Gold Pack. (Windows XP adapts this automatically, first time you use the shortcut.) And this can always stay that way. (Note that Windows XP and Vista do not show you the "@INIFILENAME" in the target field, when you open its properties dialog, which is a bit confusing.)

Changing the Shortcut Settings

There is thus no reason to ever touch the shortcuts themselves. All you have to do is to edit or replace the corresponding.ini file. For instance, for the shortcut to play against Fairy-Max, the settingsfile "fairy.ini" contains:

;
; parameters for playing against an engine
;
/cp
/firstChessProgram="fmax 22"
/firstDirectory="../Fairy-Max"
/secondChessProgram="fmax 22"
/secondDirectory="../Fairy-Max"
;
;
; define window layout
;
/autoLogo=true
/moveHistoryUp=true
/evalGraphUp=false
/engineOutputUp=false
/hideThinkingFromHuman=true
;
; define window positions
;
/winWidth=426
/winHeight=539
/moveHistoryX=426
/moveHistoryY=0
/moveHistoryW=250
/moveHistoryH=539
;
;
; prevent these settings from becoming default
; 
/saveSettingsOnExit=false

One thing that is apparent is that a .ini file can contain "comments" describing what the options do, in lines starting with a semicolon. From top to bottom, the options tell WinBoard that we want it to run a Chess program (so it skips the startup dialog), which one, and where to find it. Note that WinBoard always wants to have two Chess programs in this mode, so we give it the same twice. (The second program is only used when you select Two-Machines Mode.) In the next section we tell WinBoard that it should try to find logos to display with the players, that of the three auxiliary windows only the move history should be open, and that the Human opponent should not be alowed to see what the engine is thinking.

Then follows a section which describes exactly where to locate the windows, in this case only the move-history window. The position of this is given (in pixels) compared to the position of the main window. Note it does not specify where to position the main window, or what boardSize to use. So for this the default value will be used. (Usually what was used last time, as remembered in the winboard.ini file.) For reference, though, the width and height of the main window for which the position information on the other windows refers, is mentioned first, as /winWidth and /winHeight. This allows WinBoard to conclude at startup that the move-history window was touching the main window on the right edge (since winWidth = moveHistoryX). So that it can retain this attachment if we start up WinBoard with a main window of a different width. (E.g. because we are playing Gothic Chess on a 10x8 board.)

At the bottom there is an option that says all this should not be copied to the win board.ini file automatically. After all, because these settings are collected in a shortcut, you can summon them at the click of a mouse. So there is no reason to make them disturb the carefuly chosen settings of your previous session, which might take you a lot of effort to reproduce.

OK, that was pretty nasty, especially the coordinates part. You don't want to calculate coordinates by hand, and find out by trial and error what looks nice. A more convenient way of adjusting this, is to start WinBoard not through a shortcut, but through the startup dialog, and then drag and size the windows where you want them (or close them if you don't want them). You then save the settings in winboard.ini (usually done automatically, when you close WinBoard, but you can do it also with the "Options -> Save Settings Now" menu). Now you can open winboard.ini with the text editor, and at the end you will see all the coordinates of the windows as you just layed them out. Simply copy this information (starting with the /winWidth parameter) to the .ini file of the shortcut you are customizing.

Making a Shortcut from Scratch

If you want to create an entirely new shortcut, e.g. for a task you commonly perform, but which was not delivered with this package, you can use the following procedure:

First start up WinBoard, and bring it in exactly the state you would want it to start up in through the shortcut. Then save the settings on the winboard.ini file, make a copy of winboard.ini, and rename that copy to "MyShortcut.ini" (say). Then open this MyShortcut.ini in NotePad (usually by double-left-clicking it). Now you can add option settings to it which are normally not remembered from session to session (because they are not saved in winboard.ini), such as the variant (e.g. /variant=fischerandom), or the chess program and its folder (e.g. /fcp=Fruit /fd="..\Fruit" /fUCI).

Right-click the "winboard" knight icon (which is not a shortcut), and select "Make Shortcut" from the popup menu. Change the name of the newly appearing shortcut to "MyShortcut". Then right-click this shortcut, and select "Propeties". The text in the "target" field of the popup will now just be the name of the winboard.exe. Click this text at the end to put the cursor there (posibly with help of the arrow keys). Then add to this line " @MyShortcut.ini", so the line becomes:

and click "OK". This completes the process.

This is pretty much all that can be said about how to mak shortcuts; the main problem is to figure out what the options are that do what you want done. Looking in the winboard.ini file often can provide inspiration, and when all else fails, as a final resort, you can read the manual!