In Operation
This is what you’ll see when you start the program. The majority of the interface is divided into 4 panes accompanied by useful tabs.
By default, there aren’t any chess engines installed. If you want to play chess against an engine or use an engine for analysis, you’ll need to download an engine.
On the left of the interface is a column of 5 icons. The last icon lets you add new engines. At the time of writing, there’s one-click installation of Stockfish and Komodo available. More automation would be useful e.g. efficient downloading of Syzygy tablebases and support for importing .bin format opening books.
If you want a different chess engine, there’s support for any UCI engine. You’ll need to download such an engine to your local disk, and then use the Local tab to tell the software where to find the engine on your filesystem. The cloud tab lets you install ChessDB (a fabulous chess database) and Lichess Cloud.
Other features of the software include the ability to store and analyze games, prepare a repertoire and train it with spaced repetition. There’s also the ability to perform absolute or partial position search in the database.
Summary
En Croissant warrants our seal of approval. It’s a good chess toolkit with an attractive user interface, albeit somewhat rough around the edges in certain aspects.
We particularly like the software’s advanced search options such as searching for games with similar pawn structures, and the ability to practice random positions and keep track of your learning progress. Its database management is also a plus.
A gem of a program particularly as you can hone your chess skills with Lichess Puzzles.
En Croissant’s low number of GitHub stars is somewhat of a travesty. The number of GitHub stars a project attracts is often an unreliable indicator of a program’s usefulness.
For the program to qualify as the ultimate chess toolkit, we’d like to see the program support playing over online chess servers such as the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS).
Website: encroissant.org
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Francisco Salgueiro
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
En Croissant is written in TypeScript and Rust. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary