Chimera Programmer's Guide

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The Programmer's Guide is under construction.

A working knowledge of Python is required for the Programmer's Guide to be useful. The Python Tutorial is recommended for programmers who want a quick introduction to Python. Non-programmers should consult the Introductory Material on Python for some suggestions on where to begin.

The Chimera Programmer's Guide contains two main sections:

The Examples section demonstrates various useful Chimera programming interfaces.
The Reference section contains exhaustive listings of the contents of all Chimera Python packages.

We recommend starting with the Examples, and then examining the source code for an extension that does something similar to what you want to do and working from there. You can also use Chimera's IDLE programming shell with the dir(obj) and help(obj) functions to find out more about the attributes and methods of particular objects. The FAQ (below) can also be helpful and questions to the chimera-dev mailing list are usually quickly answered.

Also provided:

an FAQ with brief answers to common programming questions
Chimera's C++ header files, bundled as a gzipped tar archive or as a zip file
a set of guidelines for Chimera menu/widget text

Please see the Chimera documentation index and Chimera home page for other types of information.

A search tool is not provided for this locally-installed Chimera documentation, but you can search the Chimera documentation at the UCSF Computer Graphics Laboratory (CGL) web site. The documentation at the CGL site reflects a current development version of Chimera rather than the version you have installed. Although differences will be usually be minor, you may want to check the locally installed pages corresponding to the CGL pages retrieved in your search.