A way to add an "opening names" column to the SCID game list

Question

I've been googling and looking through SCID's options but just can't seem to find the answer.

The database gamelist in SCID has a few informative columns for all the games in the gamelist, including the first few opening moves and the ECO code. But I was wondering if it's also possible to, in addition to the ECO code, also add the actual opening names. Either as another column or maybe even add them to the ECO column so that it shows them like this: B96 [Sicilian: Najdorf]

There's obviously also the ECO browser tool. And that also shows ECO codes in addition to the opening name. So the information is there. Is there a way to also show that in the game list window?

I added a terrible MS paint example for reference.

Answer 1

There doesn't appear to be a way to do this directly. There's a predetermined list of columns available, and this isn't one of the choices. And, while the ECO Code field will allow you to type in a different ECO code than the one it auto-detects, it won't save anything other than a valid ECO code, so you can't just type in something like "Sicilian" or even "B96Najdorf" and have it work; the first will be ignored and the second will be truncated to "B96".

One option is to take a column that displays free text, like "Event" or "Site", and use that for the opening names instead. But this takes a lot of manual work, and you lose the information that used to be in that column.

Otherwise, SCID is open source, so you could modify the code yourself to add an opening name column, if you know programming.