Support keyboard bindings to enter variations

[amahabal]

Left and Right arrow keys go to the previous/next move, but it will be useful to enter variations as well.

Possible key suggestions:

• down key enters first non-mainline variation.
• shift+down only works on the first move of a variation and takes us to the first move of the sibling variation
• up key pops back up out of the variation.

Alternatively (even better), these could be exposed through the API.

Thanks!

[mliebelt]

Nice idea, I will give it a try (later 😄 ). I will think about different key bindings, and how they are used in different applications. With Lichess, you get:

• down key to switch to next variation, up for the previous (but not selecting).
• right selects then the current variation

What do you mean by

Alternatively (even better), these could be exposed through the API.

Should it be configurable, like (just a first idea)

keyMap: {
    LEFT: "prevMove",
    RIGHT: "nextMove",
    DOWN: "nextVariant",
    ... }

The possible functions (no argument) are defined then that can be mapped.

[amahabal]

What do you mean by

Alternatively (even better), these could be exposed through the API.

Should it be configurable, like (just a first idea)

keyMap: {
    LEFT: "prevMove",
    RIGHT: "nextMove",
    DOWN: "nextVariant",
    ... }

What I meant was that if there is a function enter-variation and a function next_move etc, some specialized use cases could write javascript that mixes and matches these. For example, in Chess-X, I find myself doing the following. There, the keys ⌘-down takes you into a variation. When I am at a node which is my blunder and has been annotated with a better variation, then that variation is not the child of my current node, it is a sibling. To get there, I have to press left followed by ⌘-down. I have keyboard maestro set up so that it does both these things when I press a different combination. With an API, one could create such custom combos.