Castling

I have a suggestion. Here's the situation:

I click on a piece, preparing to move it. lichess highlights that piece, waiting for me to decide where to move it. But then I decide to move another piece, so I click on it, and lichess resets its highlight to the new piece.

UNLESS the first piece is my King, and the second piece is my Rook, and castling with that Rook is legal. In that case, lichess castles for me. I would rather that lichess execute the castling maneuver ONLY if I click on a valid target square for a castling King.

This doesn't happen often, but it does happen. It's annoying, and an inconsistency in the interface.

Make sure you have "Castling method" set to "Move king two squares." https://lichess.org/account/preferences/game-behavior#castleByMovingTheKingTwoSquaresOrOntoTheRook

Of course, in Chess960, the only way to castle is to move the king on top of the rook.

fwiw when I start to move a piece and change my mind I attempt an illegal move to make it reset.

Doesn't something more natural like Esc key or right click work as well to cancel the selection? (Don't know, I prefer entering moves by dragging the piece.)

AsDaGo, I didn't know about that setting! Thank you!

@mkubecek said in #4:

Doesn't something more natural like Esc key or right click work as well to cancel the selection? (Don't know, I prefer entering moves by dragging the piece.)

There are many ways to cancel a selection. I'm just so accustomed to having the selection canceled and reset by clicking on a different piece that I absent-mindedly end up castling when I just meant to move a Rook.

However, AsDaGo noted above that there is a preference setting that suits me perfectly!

The first thing I did right after creating my account was going through the configuration. But I'm an old school IT guy and I'm aware that many users never check the configuration until they need to (and some not even then).

@lakfish said in #7:

@Foolacious do you mean you didn't know this despite being on lichess for more than 5 years?

Yes. Having initially missed it, the chances were good that I wasn't going to catch it later. Much like when I drop something and don't find it immediately, I'm unlikely to find it at all.

Whatever might be the case, i advise exploring the site first and then checking the previous discussions (lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/castling-mechanics-need-to-change) for a solution before creating a new topic. Also see lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/suggestion-to-reduce-duplicate-forum-threads

I did do a search on "castling" and was informed that there were no users with that name. Evidently I was using the wrong search icon. Iconography and user interfaces in general tend to defeat me, which is ironic given that I am, like @mkubecek, an old IT guy (on the back-end application development side). But I also struggle to parse spoken language, so clearly I have some learning deficits. :-)