Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

The desktop & web GUI

The GUI (built with egui) runs natively and in the browser. It has two modes:

  • Manual — play moves by hand; undo/redo; load a record or paste a game.
  • Search — run a solver (see algorithms), watch its best game live, and pause, checkpoint, or stop it.

Playing

  • Pick a variant (5T/5D/4T/4D).

  • Legal moves are highlighted; click one to play it. When several lines complete at the same point, a small picker toggle on the board chooses how you pick between them:

    • Aim — aim with the cursor and use the scroll wheel to cycle through all collinear candidates (up to five); a click plays.
    • Click — click the point to lock it (the dot turns orange), move the cursor to aim the line among the candidates, then click again to play it (Esc cancels).

    The faint stubs that distinguish touching lines are shown only in the Touching variants.

  • You can hide the legal-move markers (they then appear only on hover).

  • View controls: rotate (R) / flip (F) the board, recenter (G), zoom with Ctrl/Cmd/Shift + wheel, draw move arrows, number the moves, and a light/dark theme that also restyles the board.

Searching

  • Start from an empty cross, a seeded cross, or the loaded position.
  • A bundled record game can be loaded from the dropdown (filtered to the current variant) and also used as an NRPA warm-start seed.
  • The running search shows a live best-game preview and a node-rate readout; it can be paused, checkpointed and resumed (native).
  • For 4D/4T the systematic search can exhaust the whole tree; when it does, a dialog reports the elapsed time and that the best score is the proven optimum.
  • Beating the 178 world record (5T) triggers an audible alarm.

Records & metadata

  • A collapsible Metadata panel edits the editorial fields (author, source, transcribed-by, description, tags) that are written into your exports and filled in from imported records.
  • The first time you export without an author, a one-time prompt asks for your name and can remember it for next time.

Loading & saving

  • Import: paste a game (MSR or Pentasol), or drag and drop a .msr/.json/.psol/.png/.svg file onto the window. A PNG or SVG with no embedded record is reported plainly rather than failing.
  • Export / copy: MSR, JSON, Pentasol, SVG or PNG. The PNG and SVG embed the record, so the picture is itself a save. Copying a PNG to the clipboard warns that the clipboard image can’t carry the record (use the file export); copying SVG keeps it.
  • Keyboard: Ctrl/Cmd + Z/R undo/redo, N new game, S export, C copy, V import. The ? button lists every shortcut.

Persisted between sessions (natively and in the browser): the theme, the line-picker mode, the view toggles (arrows, numbers, legal-move markers), the search configuration (variant, algorithm, NRPA level, start point, export format), the “don’t show the rules” choice, and your default author name.