JFXChess is a cross-platform chess graphical user interface.
- based around one of the world's best chess program Stockfish
- play against the computer
- adjust strength levels to match your skill
- enter, edit and analyse games
- fully automatic game analysis
- read and save games in standard PGN format
- copy and paste FEN positions and pgn games from clipboard
- cross-platform: modern look on Linux and Windows
- handle large (i.e. 1 GB) PGN files
- easy and intuitive GUI
- free software (GNU GPL 2), no adware/spyware
Current Version: 4.3.0
Once in a while I blog about the development of JFXChess at my blog.
Version 4.3.0 (December 2024)
- improved drag'n'drop pieces to setup a new position
- finer-grained centipawn threshold when analysing games
- new opening book based on lichess master games
- packaged stockfish 17
- multipv up to 64 lines (for custom engines; for packaged engine 4 lines)
- reworked the dialog to enter game information to prevent accidently entering wrong date formats
- added ability to setup up header tags for White and Black's Elo
- ability to setup en passant square when entering a new position
- better word wrapping when entering text comments
- when opening a PGN, always scroll to entry 0
- better support for PGN files in UTF-8; removed support for legacy iso-latin-1 encodings
- moved linux snap to core22
- fixed a bug where pasting pgn or fen via clipboard did not work
- fixed a bug where replacing (overwriting) a game in a PGN did not work
- fixed a bug where the last save and open directory path where not remembered
- fixed a bug where the game result was not stored in PGN despite being set in game information dialog
Version 4.2.1 (July 2022)
- drag and drop when setting up a position (thx @TTorel)
- adjust strength for any engine that supports 'uciLimitStrength'
- flat style dialogs to better match theme
- nicer looking opening book view
- icon to indicate whose turn it is
- computer's books moves are not selected randomly, but depend on chosen engine strength and opening
- moves in bookview are shown in SAN notation instead of uci notation
- some layout fixes
- deleting games in database view
- several bugfixes
Version 4.2.0 (Dec 2021)
- opening book with statistics
- dark mode
- several bugfixes
Version 4.1.1 (Jan 2021)
- fixed bug when starting a new game
Version 4.1.0 (Jan 2021)
- several bugfixes (see issue tracker)
- database: edit & save for large PGNs
- colorize last move
- drawing arrows & colorizing fields
- keyboard shortcuts
- fullscreen mode
- option to hide toolbar
Version 4.0.0 (Oct 2020)
- complete rewrite
- position search even in very large PGN files
Version 3.2.1 (Dec 2019)
- bug fix in displaying move and position annotations
- ability to flip board when entering a new position
Version 3.2.0 (July 2019)
- MultiPV up to 4 lines
- ability to handle and search (metadata) of large (> 1 GB) PGN files
- user defined font-sizes
You can support the development of JFXChess by donating via PayPal.
various ideas for future versions:
- [DONE] opening book support
- [DONE] replace Stockfish skill level with UciLimitStrength (any engine)
- more options to edit/replace/add games in pgn files
- visual representation (i.e. graph) of game progress
- ability to set default database
- ship a default database of a few thousand interesting games
- option to show arrow that illustrates engine top-move in analysis
- [DONE] "drag" pieces in enter-position dialog
- show more engine info: Tablebase Hits and Hash percentage
- ship with pre-configured 4-piece (size!) tablebases
- ability to click on engine lines
- drag and drop for pgn files
