Knights is a graphical chess interface and tries to make full use of it. Most every option you'd ever want should be available from Knights' Settings menu and Configure window. However, there are rare cases where a command line option is an absolute must. Here are descriptions for those options.
% knights -d path
The use of this command line option is depreciated. If Knights displays garbage rather than a chessboard, then you did not set the KDEDIR environment variable correctly before compiling Knights. Please see the Installation instructions for the proper compiling procedures.
% knights filename
By appending a filename to the command line, you can start Knights with a chess match already loaded for you.