Emacs Chess is a fully featured chess client written entirely in Emacs Lisp. You can use it to play against other people on freechess.org, or against popular chess engines like gnuchess and crafty. It supports graphical rendering of chess boards within Emacs (in 2D), ASCII displays, and even electronic chess boards, or producing output appropriate braille for readers. Adding a new back-end is trivial. It also comes with a library for inspecting and reasoning about chess positions.
This project is looking for someone who loves Emacs, Lisp and the game of chess, to fork it and take over as maintainer. The FSF has agreed to include Emacs Chess as part of the Emacs distribution, but I’ve held off because of a few remaining issues I want to see resolved before it goes mainstream. It does work quite well, however, and I have friends who use it as their sole client for playing chess online.
Emacs Chess is now being hosted at GitHub, which should make it easier for others to contribute:
http://github.com/jwiegley/emacs-chess
If you’d like to just clone it and try it out, run the following and then see the README:
git clone git://github.com/jwiegley/emacs-chess.git
cd emacs-chess
git submodule init
git submodule update # grab the 2D pieces and sound sets
make
After it compiles, add the emacs-chess directory to your load-path, load
chess.el, and then type M-x chess!
If anyone is interested in taking over as the maintainer, or would like to contribute those last few weeks of work necessary to getting this project delivered with GNU Emacs, please contact me.