DC Studio

A native Mac chess database. Browse, annotate, analyze and enter games — a lightweight, PGN-native alternative to ChessBase, built for players and coaches on macOS. Part of the DanceChess family.

Website: dancechess.com/studio · Download · Changelog · vs ChessBase

Features

• One window per PGN, as tabs — board + notation on top, that file's game list below; open files come back on launch. Copy games between tabs (duplicates skipped); a file changed by another program is flagged. Arrow keys browse games and step through moves without ever touching the mouse; Enter dives into a game, Esc comes back.
• PGN is the source of truth — open any .pgn and its games are the list. Every save writes straight back to the file (atomically, with a .pgn.bak safety copy). SQLite is only a per-file cache: a 100k-game file imports in ~2 s and reopens instantly.
• Full annotation — variations (promote/delete), !/? NAGs, eval symbols, comments, undo/redo. The notation panel renders a ChessBase-style variation tree.
• Engine analysis (⌘E) — bundled Stockfish, MultiPV, eval bar, click an engine line to insert it as a variation. The engine only runs while a move is selected — no idle CPU burn.
• Whole-game analysis (⌥⌘A) — marks the losing moves ?! ? ?? for both sides or one, main line or every variation; writes what the eval did, inserts the engine's line beside each; one undo step.
• Figurines and novelties — ♘f3 on screen and paper if you want it (letters by default); the reference panel flags a move the chosen book has never seen and can write the N mark.
• Merge games — select several rows; the first game's tree takes the others as variations, comments included.
• Diagrams, print, PDF — ⌘D puts a diagram after a move (stored as ChessBase's $220); File ▸ Print Game… / Export Game as PDF….
• Filters — result, date range, Elo range, combined with text search.
• Opening reference (⌘T) — your database, or lichess's Masters / Lichess / Player explorers (your own lichess token, cached per position) — move statistics with W/D/L for the current position across the open file, and the list filters to the games that reach it (transposition-aware).
• Game entry — a blank board, a ChessBase-style save mask, and your scoresheets become clean PGN. Create a new file and build a collection from scratch.

Install

Download the latest DC-Studio-<version>-arm64.dmg from Releases, open it, and drag DC Studio into Applications. Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later — there is no Intel build. Stockfish rides along inside the bundle, so there is nothing else to install.

The app is ad-hoc signed but not notarized — there is no paid Apple Developer account behind this project — so the first launch is blocked with:

Apple could not verify "DC Studio" is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy.

That dialog offers no way to continue. Dismiss it — without letting it move the app to the trash — and then do one of:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/DC Studio.app"

...after which it opens normally. Or, without the terminal: open System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, scroll down to the Security section, and click Open Anyway next to the message about DC Studio. That button only appears after you have tried to open the app at least once.

Building

Needs the Xcode Command Line Tools, Rust, and brew install stockfish — full Xcode is not required.

git clone https://github.com/dancechess/studio.git &&cd studio
./scripts/make-app.sh # → "dist/DC Studio.app", double-clickable

Development without Xcode:

cd core && cargo test# Rust core: movegen, PGN tree, SQLite (29 tests)cd app && swift run StudioSmoke # end-to-end smoke incl. real Stockfishcd app && swift run StudioApp # run the app from the CLI

An Xcode project is optional: brew install xcodegen && xcodegen -s app/project.yml.

Cutting a release: VERSION=0.2.0 ./scripts/make-release.sh builds the DMG on your machine; pushing a v* tag runs that same script on a GitHub Actions runner and publishes the DMG to Releases (see .github/workflows/release.yml).

Good to know

• Saving normalizes your PGN. DC Studio re-serializes the whole file on save: content (moves, variations, comments, headers) is preserved — round-trip fidelity is test-covered — but formatting will differ from the original. A .pgn.bak of the pre-session file sits alongside.
• Alpha software, tested primarily by its author. Rough edges are tracked in docs/ROADMAP.md; the architecture lives in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md and the notation-panel design in docs/NOTATION-VIEW.md.

License

GPLv3 — see LICENSE. DC Studio stands on GPL shoulders: Stockfish (bundled engine), shakmaty (move generation), and the Merida piece set by Armando Hernandez Marroquin.

The released DMG ships the Stockfish binary as-is; its corresponding source lives at https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish (the exact version is named in each release's notes). The corresponding source for DC Studio itself is this repository at the release's tag.