Is there an auto fight function that 's not working? I have made a party paladin/thief/cleric/mage. I can cast magic. I destroyed the first Kobold with magic missle. I have not figured out how to use a sword. Is there a command?

I found out, you need to right-click on a sword/weapon icon when it is in a character's hand to use it. And I don' think having the thief lined up before the cleric is a good idea after all.

I wouldn't go with a pure thief, I'd create a fighter/thief so he's at least somewhat beefy and good at fighting.
Thieves in 2nd edition suck imo.
Paladin and Fighter/Thief in the front, Mage and Cleric in the back, is usually how I roll.

Back in the day you would have found that information on the data card. Sadly GOG doesn't have it. But Google can find it for you.

You can find a good copy of the data card (and map) at the Museum of Computer Adventure Games History site:

https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=eob

For anyone who isn't familiar with this site, it's an excellent source of documentation for old role-playing and adventure games.

It does occur to me that I might obtain a resurrection spell and come back and bring the halfling to life.

Sort of.

Take the bones along.

I wish there was some way the characters would stay in one place when you ask them to leave the party. It would be nice to switch characters as needed.

The only NPC that looks interesting is the ranger. Can they use a bow from the back row? My thief and mage don't have much to do, really.

They can use bows, yeah, but using bows is ill-advised in these old dungeon crawlers, because you manually have to pick up every arrow again.
It's actually pretty baffling why no one thought about implementing Grimrock's auto-pickup system back then.

Is Grimlock's auto-pickup system part of the All Seeing Eye or available somewhere else?

It is not part of All Seeing Eye that I see. And, not many fan made patches or hacks to EOB series that I am aware of. Actually not aware of any at all other than ASE. Highly certain no ammo pickup hack. Guessing it would be a tricky thing to code. Would have to run a check every square you move onto for "ammo" items, then figure out how to auto pick up and put in specific inventory slot (or quiver/bag) with same ammo type, and pay attention to max ammo in quiver/bag rules.

Isn't there supposed to be separate background music for each kind of monster?

Nope, there is no music during gameplay.

This is a great game, but...this game was designed for a 5 MHz, 8088 CPU (from 1979) expecting a system with half a megabyte of ram. (ie. 0.000512 gigabyte.)

The entire game is less than 4 megabytes; that's smaller than a typical mp3.

This game is about as bare-metal simple as can be. It has no digital sound effects; the sounds were generated on the fly using the music card, or using beeps on the PC speaker. The game needs to be given A LOT of slack from modern players. ;)

The developers [Westwood Studios] did not even include the ending cinematic with the DOS version...which GOG most certainly should have rectified for a paid retail product; this could have been done with a batch script that plays a Bink file after the game ends.

When you complete the game, return here, and visit this Youtube Link to see the ending cinematic that should have shipped with the game.

https://youtu.be/lFGqrR7Zcl0?t=64