TheMainWindow

The main window in Scid displays the current board position of the active game and information about the current game and database. Separate help pages describe the menus and ways to enter chess moves.

Game navigation buttons

The navigation buttons above the board have the following meanings, from left to right:
Move to the start of the game. [Home]
Move back one move. [Left]
Move forward one move. [Right]
Move to the end of the game. [End]
Move into a variation. [v]
Move out of the current variation. [z]
Add a new variation. [Ctrl-A]
Signifies that the current move has a textual comment attached. This comment is displayed in a tooltip upon mouse hovering on the button. Pressing the button also opens up the Comment editor
Start/stop [AutoplayMode] (see below). [Ctrl-Z]
Start/stop [TrialMode]. [Ctrl-Space]
Rotate the board 180 degrees. [.]
Show/hide board coordinates. [0]
Keyboard shortcuts are given in square brackets.

The game information area

The area below the chessboard showing information about the game is called the game information area. Its first three lines show information such as the players, their country, result, date, and site. This information is drawn from the games PGN header. To show country information the fields WhiteCountry/BlackCountry need to be available. The fourth line indicates the current position in the game, and what the next move is.

Additionally, flags set for a given game are shown. Here, custom flags only show up by their respecitve number while the standard flags also show their textual meaning.

Next to the flags a link called Bib may show up in case the PGN header contains a bibliographic link, ie. a link to the chess literature. This link is to be placed in a special header field called Bib and links the game to a BibTeX database containing the bibliographic information. This linking is done by almost standard LaTeX structure, that is the Bib field contains first the BibTeX key. Additinal information (e.g. page, game number...) may be added by , addinfo. To give more than one bibliogrpahic link several of this entries may be separated by ; (ie. space semicolon space). To resolve the bibliographic reference, Scid first searches a .bib-file named like the database in the database directory. If it can not find such a file it resorts to ~/.scid/data/Bookshelf.bib.

The fifth line shows the ECO (Encyclopedia of Chess Openings) code for the current position, if the position appears in the ECO file being used.

If Scid can find a suitable photo file (either in ~/.scid or Scids share directory within the photos folder) and photos for the players exist, also these photos show up in the information area. (Suitable photo files can be downloaded from the Scid website; a documentation of their format is contained within these files.) However, the player photos tend to hide some text in the information area. Therefore, they can be minimised temporarily by clicking on them.

The game information area has a menu activated with the right mouse button, with options to hide the next move (useful if you are training using a game and want to guess each move) and to delete or undelete the current game. You can also activate this menu without using the mouse, by pressing the [F9] function key.

On the right hand side of the board the material balance can be displayed by small piece symbols. E.g. if white has captured a bishop while black has captured a knight, a white bishop and a black knight show up.

Tablebases

The game information area also displays tablebase results whenever the displayed position reaches a material configuration found in a tablebase file. See the tablebases help page for details.

The status bar

The status bar shows information about the current database. The first field indicates the game status: XX means it has been altered and not yet saved, while -- means it is unchanged, and %% indicates the database is read-only (not alterable).

If you want a database to be opened read-only, just set the permissions of its Scid files, or at least its index file, for example: chmod a-w myfile.si3 as a shell command, and it will be opened read-only by Scid.

The status bar also shows how many games are currently in the filter.