in bughouse it's important to be able to communicate with your partner,
but normally the games are fast (2-3 min), so interfaces like "thief"
have a neat way of clicking on standard messages, like:
http://www.thief-interface.com/target7.html
would be cool, to incorporate something similar into the chat window or
the main board window, including good highlighting of messages from your
partner... I guess the chat stuff could sit below the jail for example
and the last message from your partner could be shown below the board.
That way you don't have to take your eyes off the board too much ;)
Also some message buttons that the user could configure would be nice,
we could have those in the normal chat window, things like "thanks for
the game" "*handshake*"...
In WinBoard the ICS text menu serves this function. It is user configurable,
so you could put the tell commands you frequently need to send in there.
Currently it is such that the commands can contain a variable word,
which will be substituted by the word you clicked to summon-up the menu
(usually a player handle). I don't know if the ICS supports commands to
automatically talk to your partner (like 'say' automatically talks to your
opponent). If not, we could also introduce a variable that is automatically
substituted by your partner's name. (Supposing that WB could somehow
become aware of this.)
