xilem-chess

March 15, 2026 · View on GitHub

A chess interface powered by the Xilem GUI framework for the lightweight Salewski Chess Engine. Chess UI

✨ Overview

xilem-chess is a Rust-based chess GUI built with Xilem, a declarative UI toolkit. It connects to the compact “Salewski chess engine” and displays a clean, responsive chessboard with live engine moves handled through multi-threading and message passing.

Key highlights:

Unicode chess piece rendering
Play modes for Player vs Engine and Engine vs Engine
Adjustable engine move timing
Move highlighting for suggestions and last moves
A simple (inacurate) chess clock
Display of movelist, and option to print the list in the terminal
Thread-safe engine communication via Rust’s mpsc channels

🚀 Features

✅ Fully interactive chessboard
✅ Customizable seconds-per-move for the engine
✅ Board rotation toggle
✅ Move list output to the terminal
✅ Responsive board built with Xilem’s flex/grid system
⚠️ Only click-to-move input (no drag-and-drop yet)
⚠️ No save/load or PGN export functionality
❌ Dynamic scaling and window title updates are not yet supported by Xilem

📦 Requirements

Rust 1.78+ (2024 edition)
Xilem (latest from GitHub)
masonry for layout
tokio, num-traits, winit for async and platform integration

Chess pieces are drawn using Unicode symbols. Most systems already have suitable fonts, but the Google font Noto Sans Symbols is bundled and used by default (under Google’s copyright).

🔧 Build & Run

git clone https://github.com/stefansalewski/xilem-chess.git
cd xilem-chess
cargo run --release

When you have a system font with chess pieces support, you can use features=useSystemFont to use it instead of the bundled Noto font.

You can install the game like other Rust tools with

cargo install --path .
# or cargo install --features=useSystemFont --path .

When launched, the left panel provides game controls; the right displays the interactive board.

🕹️ Controls

Control	Action
Engine plays White	Enable/disable engine control of white pieces
Engine plays Black	Enable/disable engine control of black pieces
Rotate	Flip the board’s orientation
New game	Reset to starting position
Print movelist	Output move history to terminal
Sec/move	Adjust engine’s thinking time per move

Moves are made by clicking a piece’s square, then its destination square.

🧠 Internal Design

AppState — manages the board, settings, and UI state
engine::Game — contains chess rules and logic
Threaded messaging — task(...) with mpsc::Receiver<Move> for engine responses
engine_to_board(...) — converts engine’s internal state to UI data structures
UI layout — composed using Xilem’s grid, button, checkbox, label, etc.

📱 Platform Compatibility

✅ Linux (X11 and Wayland)
✅ Windows (expected to run without issues)
⚠️ macOS (not tested, should work)
⚠️ Android (android_main, experimental)

❗ Known Gaps

No dynamic widget scaling or runtime window title changes
Missing promotion UI, PGN handling, and drag-and-drop support

🧪 Developer Notes

This UI was inspired by the stopwatch.rs and calc.rs examples from Xilem, as well as the previous egui-based tiny-chess. The focus is on keeping engine logic separate from UI state for maintainability.

Debug mode:

RUST_LOG=debug cargo run

The GUI uses currently always the latest Xilem version from GitHub, so from time to time tiny code changes might be required.

🔄 Alternative Interfaces

The same engine code can be used with:

Egui UI — https://github.com/StefanSalewski/tiny-chess
3D Bevy UI — https://github.com/StefanSalewski/Bevy-3D-Chess

Older Nim, GTK, and blocking egui versions are now deprecated and will be removed.

📄 License

Bundled font: Noto Sans Symbols 2 — see Google’s license for details.