Overview

An Emacs major-mode for chess engine interaction.

• Quickstart
• uci-mode
• Interactive Commands
• Screenshot
• Remote Engines
• Compatibility and Requirements

Quickstart

$ which stockfish
/usr/local/bin/stockfish

(require 'uci-mode)

M-x uci-mode-run-engine

uci-mode

Uci-mode is a comint-derived major-mode for interacting directly with a UCI chess engine. Direct UCI interaction is interesting for programmers who are developing chess engines, or advanced players who are doing deep analysis on games. This mode is not useful for simply playing chess.

Provides

• syntax highlighting of UCI engine output
• customizable faces
• persistent history of UCI commands
• integration with pygn-mode for PGN editing
• remote engine access over SSH

Interactive Commands

No keys are bound by default. Consider binding keys in an eval-after-load form.

Engine Commands

• uci-mode-run-engine — Run an inferior UCI engine process
• uci-mode-restart-engine — Restart or replace an inferior UCI engine process
• uci-mode-send-stop — Send a "stop" message to the UCI engine
• uci-mode-send-setoptions — Send the preconfigured value of uci-mode-engine-setoptions to the UCI engine

Screenshot

Showing pygn-mode integration:

Remote Engines

The variable uci-mode-engine-command accepts a list, the first of which is the local executable, the remainder of which are arguments. Assuming that there is no interactive password prompt, a remote engine may be accessed over SSH like this:

(setq uci-mode-engine-command '("ssh" "example.com" "/usr/local/bin/stockfish"))

The value of uci-mode-engine-command may also be set via customize.

Compatibility and Requirements

GNU Emacs 25.1 or higher

A command-line UCI engine executable, the default being Stockfish