ucui

A minimal UCI engine frontend experiment.

It's intended to be used as a least disruptive interface when playing over the board with a chess engine.

It's a work in progress. If you want to give it a try, you'll have to compile it from source. For this you'll need to install rust, clone or download this repository, then cargo run --release -- --help (release builds are very long to compile, but it happens only once) from the directory where the code ended up.

Note that it embeds the blunders chess engine that is enough to test the interface. To play with a more advanced engine, you need to instruct ucui to do so, e.g.:

$ which stockfish
/usr/games/stockfish
$ cargo run --release -- --engine /usr/games/stockfish --white-time 1200 --black-time 300

Usage: ucui [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -e, --engine <ENGINE>
          Path to a UCI engine

  -w, --white-time <TIME>
          White time in seconds

          [default: 600]

  -b, --black-time <TIME>
          Black time in seconds

          [default: 600]

  -c, --engine-color <COLOR>
          set engine color

          [default: black]

          Possible values:
          - white: Engine takes white
          - black: Engine takes black

  -f, --fen <FEN>
          Optional starting position in FEN format

      --engine-args <ARGS>
          Optional arguments to pass to the engine (separated by ";")

          Example: --engine-args '--uci;--quiet'

      --log-level <LOG_LEVEL>
          set log level

          [default: info]

          Possible values:
          - off:   A level lower than all log levels
          - error: Corresponds to the `Error` log level
          - warn:  Corresponds to the `Warn` log level
          - info:  Corresponds to the `Info` log level
          - debug: Corresponds to the `Debug` log level
          - trace: Corresponds to the `Trace` log level

      --uci-option <UCI_OPTION>
          UCI option

          This argument can be repeated. UCI options are of the form KEY:VALUE. See the engine's documentation for available options and their default values.

          Example: --uci-option 'Threads:2' --uci-option 'Skill Level:12'

  -h, --help
          Print help (see a summary with '-h')

  -V, --version
          Print version