The Repertoire editor lets you create, view, edit and repertoire files. A repertoire (.sor) file is a list of the opening positions you want to reach or try to avoid, and you can use it to manage your chess opening preferences and also to search databases in Scid.
A repertoire contains two types of elements: groups and lines. Groups are not actually part of your repertoire; they are only used to structure it the same way directories give structure to the files on a computer disk.
Lines in a repertoire come in two types: include lines which represent opening positions you are interested in and try to reach, and exclude lines which are those you have no interest in playing and try to avoid. For example, if you play the QGA (1.d4 d5 2.c4 dxc4) as Black and you play all moves after 3.e4 except 3...Nf6, you would have 1.d4 d5 2.c4 dxc4 3.e4 as an include line and 1.d4 d5 2.c4 dxc4 3.e4 Nf6 as an exclude line.
Each group or line can have comments attached to it. There are two types: short (single-line) comments appear (in red) in the repertoire hierarchy next to the moves of a group or line, while a long (multiple-line) comment is only shown when the group or line is selected.
The left side of the window shows the repertoire hierarchy. You can click on folder icons to expand and collapse groups, and click on the moves of a group or line to select it and see its comments. Include lines are shown with a blue tick icon, and exclude lines have a red cross.
If a line or group has a short comment, it is shown after the moves. If it has a long comment, this is indicated with ** after the moves. Groups have a number in parentheses after their moves showing the number of (include and exclude) lines they contain.
Clicking the right mouse button on a group or line produces a menu of functions for it, such as deleting it or changing its state.
The right side of the window contains three frames. The first frame is a list of the moves in the currently selected line or group. You can click the left mouse button on this to paste the moves in the Import window, which is useful for setting the current game to start with a line in the repertoire. The second frame contains the short comment for the line or group, and the third frame contains its long comment.
To add a line or group to the window, just make its moves on the chessboard in the main window, then use the [Edit] menu in the repertoire editor to add it as a group, include line or exclude line.
To delete a group or line, click the right mouse button on it and select the appropriate command from the menu that appears.
The repertoire editor [Search] menu lets you search the current database using the repertoire. Each game will be searched for the positions in the repertoire and will only match the search if the deepest repertoire position found is for an include line.
You can choose to search using the whole repertoire, or just the displayed lines. Searching by displayed lines only is useful when you only want to use some of the repertoire. For example, a repertoire might have two main groups at the top level, one for 1.e4 and one for 1.d4. If you are only interested in the 1.e4 lines, simply collapse the 1.d4 group and then search by displayed lines only.
A repertoire file is great for finding new games in your opening systems. For example, each time you get a new PGN file to add to your main database (such as the excellent weekly PGN file from The Week In Chess), just open the PGN file in Scid and do a repertoire search. Then you can browse the filtered games to see all the games played that are in your repertoire.
You may want to keep two repertoire files: one for Black and one for White, so you can search with each file separately.
A repertoire file can be opened from the command line, for example:
scid mybase white.sor
You can edit a repertoire (.sor) file in any text editor, but be careful to preserve its format or it may not be loadable or searchable in Scid.