there are several clients and editors around, but as yet, not one that has all the bells and whistles i want, and not all the bells and whistles i don't want which only get in the way of my microscopic memory.

i can't remember why now, but a while back i switched from gogui to cgoban; it must have had something i wanted that gogui didnt provide.

when i look at cgoban now, i find myself wishing i could delete a variation with the Delete key instead of having to mouse all the way over to the other side of the screen and slide down the menu to Cut.

when i use Lizzie, i wish i could edit the tree, but i love her use of spacebar to switch pondering on/off, which is very convenient to give my cpu a hard-earned cooling down rest while i do a bit of pondering myself

when i use Influencie, i wish it could tell me what Lizzie sees and when i use Lizzie i wish it could tell me what Influencie sees

does Sabaki have all the functionality and ease-of-use of both cgoban and Lizzie?

tree navigation has always been awkward for me, as i can never remember which button does what.

to me, right-arrow means "go forwards" and left-arrow means "go back". Go trees tend to be longer than wide, and computer screens are usually wider than tall, so it would seem sensible to lay out a tree sideways, like cgoban does. Then up-arrow intuitively means go to the start of the variation above, and down-arrow to the start of the variation below. i can't remember offhand, but i think that's not what cgoban does.

when reviewing, or learning from an expertly marked-up sgf, i would like to be able to scroll through just the endpoints of variations, to see how they compare. As that's something i would like to do often without having to think about how to do it, spacebar would be the obvious choice. So ctrl+spacebar could be used for switching on/off pondering. Or the other way round....

My keyboard doesnt have a button labelled Help, but F1 used to be used for that in the old days. i have 12 F-buttons in front of me, and have no idea what any of them do! all i can remember is that Ctrl-C means copy, except when i'm using a Linux command-line, when it means Abort!!

OGS lets me draw lines on the board, which i like because being into thinking about influence and moyos, i like lines, even if most of the people i review with can't be fussed about niceties and just want to know immediately what the best move is - and how the heck do they expect me to know that?! but all the ones 1 rank stronger than me are always sure they always do

Am i clucking like an old hen? Is it my responsibility to learn the 1001 languages used by 1001 software developers, and not their responsibility to make life easier for their users?

Well, the answer is pretty easy: You mentioned using/trying gogui, cgoban, Lizzie, Influencie, Sabaki(?) and OGS.
How much money did you spend to be able to use all those software? For this price, that's nobody's responsibility to make you life easier.

So what are you going to do about this?

Happy Chinese new year

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I am the author of GoReviewPartner, a small software aimed at assisting reviewing a game of Go. Give it a try!

In Lizzie use Delete or Backspace to delete a node of the tree, and shift left/right to reorder branches.

I am thankful to all the developers of these wonderful free tools.

For a specific change, I can kindly ask the developers to spend their time adjusting their free software. General ideas for fun that may be useful can be posted.

As for your case; they say if you want to see something, make it (you likely only need to learn one language too ).

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On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.

Do unto others as i would have them do unto me 恭喜發財 红包拿来 https://github.com/gogre/irgobot/blob/master/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/feature_request.mdGreat Scot! Lizzie has a secret language - is she a Skull-and-Boneser ?Whereas some would - perhaps wisely, in light of Mr Snowden's revelations about Goggle and Twofacebook - Beware of Geeks bearing Gifts, i too am a simple sardine that worships at the alter of Open Source...
https://github.com/gogre/irgobot
...but i fear for OS future, for like Venezuela, no sooner than you start handing out the bear necessities to junglebook proles, than Big Brother from over the sea will train its drones and cornflour monopolies on you to get the NWO back on track.

So i guess the one language that Elom means i need to learn is the language of the secret handshake. I already employ serfs to repair my car and peasants in Africa and China to grown my tea and coffee, so i guess i should just lie back on the chaise longue and let Laizy play my Go for me too and rub my hands in glee behind the velvet curtain as she crushes all my enemies.

Now, that's what i call really Ease of Use !

a funny thing happened on my way to the forum,...

for someone interested in user interface design, it is ironic that i often have a lot of trouble explaining myself in such a way that people don't immediately grab hold of the wrong end of the stick and start running with it even before i've finished the first sentence, closing their ears as my howls of anguish recede into the distance.

on the advice of aliffe 0 people, i'm not going to give up my day job,

but i still have a dream...

Martin Luther's dream is... [on second thoughts, better not go there], ... and Martin Luther King's dream is only 3% realised, and John Lennon's Imagine dream hasn't even started to happen yet, and Trump and Brexit are taking us swiftly downhill the other way back to the Middle Ages -

but being incorrigibly "tetu", i plough on...

what i meant to say is, this time without any attempt at humour, satire, or irony, that there are a lot of different people out there with a lot of good ideas about editors, clients, and LZ interfaces, and they even talk to each other occasionally, but from what they actually do, it feels like they are more in competition with each other than collaboration.

the same cannot be said for LZ herself, as there is now one de facto archetype, which a score of enthusiasts are intent upon making her stronger than every old gunslinger in town and any other young gun upstart that wants to take over the High Street.

Perhaps Sir Humphrey was right when he said the only reason Britain wanted to join the EU was to make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing - although it looks more and more like the EU is going exactly the way its planners intended, to their exclusive benefit, but that's another story...

Despite the unquestionable fact that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, i feel that more progress on improving the functionality and facility of Go clients/editorsinterfaces could be made if their designers and implementers were sit around an open table in public view to discuss ideas about the way forward, and to receive input from Joe Public - not about bugs or forks/ports or platforms, but, to maintain focus, solely about the relative merits of UI features already on offer and desires for features that are not.

i don't see why such a meeting couldn't be asynchonous, conducted over the lifetimes of the participants, as and when they feel like saying anything, in a single locus of focus to make it easier for newbies to find out where to look.

that's what forums are for.

it would have to be moderated, to forestall flames, rages, personal conflicts, fillibustering and impractical wishfulness, especially of the rosy type exhibited by certain famous people to seduce greed-blind investors into giving them even bigger loads of money.

you may say that i am a dreamer, and i probably am the only one, but here's where i would start:

Sabaki has a lot of handy functionality, and
Lizzie has a some nice aesthetics,
and there is Go Review Partner too,
and a new GoGui,
and more i am sure,
and every server has its own different client,

but none of them* could be said to include any AI,
and yet, LZ is all and only AI,
so there's a huge mismatch of operability between engine and interface

so...

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* apart from baby irgobot, but she hasn't made it out of the womb yet - Sabaki's Analysis feature does use whole-board Monte-Carlo to mark deadstones, but that may be a mistake as my next video will attempt to explain, and OGS uses Monte-Carlo to count territory, which only works adequately when there are no more legal moves