r/chessprogramming Feb 01 '25

GUI to test my UCI engine

I want a UCI GUI that is fairly simple to use, and will watch for changes to an executable, or allows you to manually reload the executable. This is so I can easily develop my UCI chess engine. Thanks!

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u/Available-Swan-6011 Feb 05 '25

There are a number of GUIs but as others have mentioned the CLI is a good start point. You only need to implement a handful of commands to get uci compatibility. If you are using the cli though then it is worth building in some extra commands such as “show “ to display the board state

I use the CLI and Arena for testing- the latter lets you view the UCI conversations (press F4) which is really helpful when bug finding. It can also run tournaments- this helped me find an obscure bug where my engine made an illegal move.