Keyboard piece movement is a function that i personally miss. And many many chess programs out there really forget about.
In general the maximum amount of keyboard commands out do the max with a mouse by a long shot. I believe this could be true in chess as well at least until you reach the endgame.
A positive thing could be no divided attention between courser and pisces, and i believe it would force a beginner to remember opening moves better when you have to type them.
I really would like to see keyboard movement with
Algebraic notation with the the exception of x and = not being a necessity to type maybe the numlock 0 being right side castling and o being left side castling . And for example Rdb2 is correct but Rb2d should work as well. Maybe the Alt key to switch between chat and price movement.
Please comment and let me know what you think and i hope this is something i will see in the near feature. Best regards.
I started poking at the code some time ago, but as usual I got distracted by something shiny. I would really like to see this feature, so I will peek at the code once again.
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Random stuff my brain spewed out
The first step is to allow algebraic, but in addiction I'm trying to figure out the "fastest" way to accurately input various moves. It should be possible to make the keyboard input better than the mouse :p
For example using only numbers for the squares, 12 = a2. This would allow faster input with one hand if using/having numpad and make it easier for us that can't remember what order the letters are.
Maybe allowing to only type in the target, then select available pieces with spacebar. Looping through the pieces would work in slow games, but in faster games the order needs to be somewhat predictable. An alternative if not only using numbers, is to assign a-h to the pawns and 1-8 to the pieces which would need only 1 character to accurately select a certain piece (promoted pieces keep their letters).
The problem with overloading the numbers, is that it is harder to make predictions. For example correcting a1 to h1 could work by just typing "h" randomly at the end... not sure about all this, I'm going to need to go through some games and see what would work.
This is nice to here. Regarding the brainstorming for fastest possible output.
It might speed up the process to use QWER as ABCD and ASDF as EFGH and the thumb could press ZXCVB for pisces selection NBRQK in the order of point value and I'm thinking B for king as he's used a lot in endgame and b is easily pressed with once thumb.
Im also thinking that enter shouldn't be necessary once you've typed something that works it gets played.
Why not just allow standard notation?
e4
e5
nf3
nc6
A competent typer should be able to dish out any of these moves with extreme ease, and there wouldn't be a need to learn an entirely new language just to input moves with the keyboard.
Moves where specifying the piece is necessary will add a few characters to the input, but there's no way around that.
This should be a tool to help familiarize yourself with notation, not a way to outpace the mouse in bullet games, which is absolutely not going to happen no matter how sophisticated your bindings are.
#4 I think teaching chess notation shall be on a different agenda, ie. as an extention to coordinate exercises available in training. #3,#2,#1, I think a combo of NBQRK (none=Pawn) and double digit destination identifier seems good, but I have no idea which buttons shall translate to NBQRK, since they are not placed ideally on a normal QWERTY. Regardless, i feel an 8 by 8 grid game shall be playable via keyboard
Why would anyone want that though
People still willingly choose to use the qwerty layout in 2015?
we should all use colemak?
How did you know I use colemak?
#9, eatchipss probably guessed as much due to your elitism. :P And I say that an ergonomics freak myself. ;)
Joking aside, I think NBQRK would be perfect and fit all Latin alphabet layouts. "None" is not possible because you can't choose to not promote. So I think it's pretty much settled. Now someone just needs to do the work. :P
I think the best method is typing a few letters in, which appear just next to the board, and as you type, you select different elements. For example, if you have only one knight (N) on the F file:
1. Hitting 'n' highlights both knights.
2. Hitting 'f' afterwards highlights just the one knight.
3. You can hit backspace to return to the previous state, etc
That would indeed make for a great desktop user experience, but it sounds extremely difficult to do and frankly quite niche. I wouldn't want this turned on by default because it would leave a LOT of players confused, as they are unlikely to be accustomed to keyboard shortcuts in a web browser (thus causing a UI anti-pattern).
