Here the textfield 'Filter' is used as a quick finder for games. Similar textfields appear elsewhere, too (e.g. in the result viewer). Further search options (FEN, endgame, material, player, etc) are available in the menu 'Search'.

If you click twice on any game in the list, the game browser opens with this game. But there is another way, which is in particularly after searches very useful: Click once on a game in the list.

This is a board tooltip which gives you quick information. For a normal game it starts showing the position after 5 moves. If auto-play in tooltip is active (see under Properties, where also the velocity can be changed), then the game is shown move by move. You can take over control with the arrow keys on your keyboard (left = backward, right = forward). You can also choose the previous or the next game with the arrow keys (up = previous, down = next).

If a search is active, then the starting point can be different. For example, if you have searched for rook endings, then the game is shown with the start of the rook ending.

There are a lot of useful features with this tooltip. It can be moved to a convenient location. And piece tracking of one kind of piece can activated (see under Properties). Let's say you have opened a PGN file with endgame studies and you have already restricted the games to rook endgame studies. Then you can track white rooks, i.e. the maneuvers of the white rook(s) will be shown in the tooltip.

Search Menu handling

Every search constraint offers a sub-menu with three options. If the constraint is still unset, it has a grey filter symbol and the sub-menu looks like this.

If the constraint has already been set, this is indicated by a green filter symbol and the sub-menu looks like this.

Search restrictions can be changed and also negated individually. And thy can be combined, of course.

FENs to clipboard

There's a mass data interface for FENs which should be explained.

I worked a lot with PGN files containing positions of mutual or reciprocal zugzwang, for example those that can be found on John Beasley's page. Every game consists of such a start position with only a single null move. You can open such a file and select all of the mini games you are interested in by the existing features. Now, with the first option, you can get all start positions as FENs into the system clipboard. And from here you can paste these FENs wherever you like, for example in the "Search for position (FEN)" dialog of another PGN file browser showing some real games.

There are options Bulk analysis and Opening trees in the File menu. Choosing the first one opens this dialog.

This is a special search including possibly material balance and engine evaluations. The above settings will find all serious games by Alekhine, where his evaluation was down, but he did not lose. Note that engine evaluations will need much time, and the shown setting of two evaluation conditions, one with a small depth, another with larger depth, will speed up the search.

If a bulk search involves engine evaluations, then you should save the result as a bulk result (and not only as a PGN file), because such a bulk result contains these evaluations, which are shown in the game browser's profile tabs.

There are two kind of opening trees that can be generated from all games in the PGN file: one with all games (not shown) and another one called repertoire tree, which can be configured as follows.

This generates the following tree.

As stated above, large PGN files are not always opened immediately. If the file size exceeds 8.0 MB, a warning is issued. It depends on your computer whether larger files can be opened successfully. I assume that most users can open much larger files without problems. However, for every machine (or better JVM) there is a size that won't work. Then the Chess Suite becomes inactive silently (that's not my fault!) and you have to restart it. The warning is there to always remind you of this possibility.