chess-tui

A rusty chess game in your terminal 🦀

Description

Chess-tui is a simple chess game you can play from your terminal. It supports local 2 players mode, online multiplayer, playing against any UCI compatible chess engine, custom skins and more !

Quick install

cargo install chess-tui
chess-tui

If you want to install the game with your favorite package manager, you can find the installation guide here.

Available on

Features

Helper menu

Local 2 player mode

Online multiplayer

Draws

• Stalemate
• 50 moves rules
• 3 time repetition of the same position

Piece Promotion

no demo available yet

Move History Navigation (Solo Mode)

Navigate through move history with P (previous) and N (next) keys. Make moves from any historical position to create alternate game branches.

Play against any UCI chess engine as black or white

Play the white pieces

Play the black pieces

Connect a chess engine

You can play chess-tui with any UCI compatible chess engines. To do so you will need to use the -e command to give the chess engine binary path.

Example:

chess-tui -e /your/bin/path

Here I installed stockfish using homebrew and gave chess-tui the path the the engine binary. This command will store in your home directory the chess engine path so you don't have to relink it everytime !

You can also set the bot thinking depth directly from the command line:

chess-tui -e /your/bin/path --depth 15

This will set the bot to think at depth 15 for this session.

Configuration

Chess-tui uses a TOML configuration file located at ~/.config/chess-tui/config.toml. Here are the available configuration options:

# Path to the chess engine binary
engine_path = "/path/to/engine"

# Display mode: "DEFAULT" or "ASCII"
display_mode = "DEFAULT"

# Logging level: "Off", "Error", "Warn", "Info", "Debug", "Trace"
log_level = "Off"

# Bot thinking depth for chess engine (1-255, default: 10)
bot_depth = 10

Configuration Options:

• engine_path: Path to your UCI-compatible chess engine binary
• display_mode:
  • DEFAULT: Uses unicode chess pieces
  • ASCII: Uses ASCII characters for pieces
• log_level: Controls the verbosity of logging
  • Off: No logging (default)
  • Error: Only errors
  • Warn: Warnings and errors
  • Info: General information, warnings and errors
  • Debug: Debugging information
  • Trace: Very verbose debugging information
• bot_depth: Controls how deep the chess engine thinks (1-255, default: 10)
  • Higher values make the bot stronger but slower
  • Lower values make the bot faster but weaker

The config file is automatically created when you first run chess-tui. You can manually edit it to customize your experience.

All logs are stored in ~/.config/chess-tui/logs.

Game Controls

Basic Controls:

• Arrow keys or h/j/k/l: Move cursor
• Space or Enter: Select/move piece
• Esc: Deselect piece or close popups
• ?: Show help menu
• q: Quit game
• b: Return to home menu
• s: Cycle through available skins
• r: Restart current game
• p: Navigate to previous position in history
• n: Navigate to next position in history

Base config:

# no engine path
display_mode = "DEFAULT"
log_level = "Off"
bot_depth = 10

Documentation

You can find the documentation of the project here

Roadmap

You can find the roadmap of the project here if you want to contribute.

Crates.io

The project is also available on crates.io here