What is it?

Play Chess in the terminal!

Features

The current functionality includes:

• Play against chess engines
• Play against another user over the network
• Load a game position from a FEN
• Export games to PGN

Here is an example of how it looks in the terminal

Roadmap

Features that still need to be added

• Add UCI compatability Minimally implemented
• Detect Stalemate
• Detect 3-fold repetition stalemate
• Load/save FEN from/to files
• export/import PGN format
• Flip view of the board between black and white perspective
• Networking

Install

Install from AUR here
run $make install to compile the program and install it.

Usage

A list of command line arguments can be seen with $./chessterm --help
In the program you will be presented with a view of the current position and a prompt. You can type
: help
to see all of the commands you can run while the program is runinng. You can also type a move in SAN notation to make a move.
Example: : e4 or : Nf3
Pieces must be uppercase, and files must be lowercase for the move to be read correctly.

Networking

To play against someone on the network, simple have on player run chessterm with the command chessterm -h to act as the host, and the other player use the command chessterm -c IPADDRESS to connect to the host. You can also use the machine's hostname instead of the IP address if your network supports hostname resolution.

Engines

Any chess engine that supports the Universal Chess Interface (UCI) protocol can be connected to chessterm with the chessterm --white_engine="PATH/TO/ENGINE". You can replace --white_engine with --black_engine to make the engine play as black.