Best chess gui

Hi All,

What is the best chess gui out there? I'm not looking for the most featured one, but something that is quite user-friendly

Cheers

WinBoard/XBoard is pretty simple to operate.

What operating system do you use?

If the answer is Windows: "HIARCS Chess Explorer" or "Shredder Classic" are pretty intuitive - unfortunately both commercial.

HGM: I love your GUI. I use it every day. It's very feature rich and the only good GUI I know for chess variants, but it's far from intuitive. Tell someone who don't know this GUI to connect to FICS, or set up a position (+choosing a side to play or grant- or forbid castling).

It's impossible to do for a newbie without googling or reading the xboard/winboard "what is new in version xxx" page. No problem in the above mentioned GUIs (except for FICS play, which they don't support afaik). It's still one of the best GUI's, but you need to learn certain things first.

Well, for connecting to FICS you can select "Chess server - freechess.org" from the Windows Start menu. (There also is a shortcut FICS.xop thatyou can double-click when you are in the WinBoard folder.) That doesn't sound very complex or non-standard to me. In fact, it is hard to imagine for me how that could be made any simpler. And having a GUI that cannot do it at all doesn't seem much of an improvement. If you are happy with that, you can just not do it on WinBoard. Not doing something is always ultimately simple, also in WinBoard...

I am open to suggestions for how seting up positions could be made more intuitive or easy. The easiest way I found so far is by calling up the piece-palette board, and just dragging the pieces to the desired place, using the Ctrl key to indicate whether it should be a move or copy. In terms of speed this is hard to beat. I agree that it is not very obvious you can do this, though. Would it be an improvement to print a message above the board like "Moving with Ctrl pressed copies the piece"?