About ChessX

# ChessX Help

## ChessX Basics

### Summary

ChessX is an Open Source chess database UI. With ChessX you can operate on your collection of chess games in many ways:
browse, edit, add, organize, analyze, etc.

ChessX is cross-platform. It works on MS™ Windows, GNU/Linux and OS X.

### Current Features

- Multi-platform. It supports MS™ Windows, GNU/Linux and OS X
- Load and save PGN files
- Work with multiple databases simultaneously
- Browse games, including variations
- Enter moves, variations, comments
- Setup board, copy/paste FEN
- Search header (click on columns in GameList header)
- Display opening tree for current position
- Analyze using UCI and Winboard/Xboard Chess engines
- Play Online on Free Internet Chess Server (FICS), access games onLichess.org and Chess.com

### Planned Features

- Store games in native binary format
- Calculate ELO performance

### Development

Github is used to manage development. SourceForge Bugs is used to keep track of bug reports and feature requests.

If you want to participate in development, fork and check out ChessX's source code with git, or the GitHub desktop. This allows you to send pull requests after completing your tasks. This is the easiest way to get changes implemented into mainstream ChessX. Please, sign up to the developer's mailing list and introduce yourself.

The code uses the Qt library. To compile from source, Qt 5.14.1 or later is required.

All classes are documented using Doxygen.

For a long time, ChessX development was pushed forward by Michal Rudolf.

Currently, there are two active ChessX developers: James Coons and current maintainer Jens Nissen. The main tester and usability expert is Bruno Rizzuti.

Among inactive developers we would like to mention Marius Roets, Sean Estabrooks, Rico Zenklusen, William Hoggarth and Ejner Borgbjerg who wrote significant parts of code. Heinz Hopfgartner made useful tests and maintained the OS X port.