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MolecularViewers
Marcin Wojdyr edited this page Jun 26, 2020
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that you should use instead of UglyMol if you need pretty graphics or if you don't care about electron density
I haven't spent a lot of time with these program, so take my comments below with a grain of salt.
- Mol* - new collaboration between authors of NGL and LiteMol (TypeScript),
- NGL - rich UI and plenty of features, used on RCSB website,
- 3Dmol - lightweight with well-documented API,
- JSmol - JMol translated to JavaScript. Works with and without WebGL. The most popular viewer on the web.
- Molmil - from PDBj. No dependencies.
- LiteMol - announced by PDBe in 2016 (TypeScript).
Also worth knowing about:
- GLmol - the first WebGL viewer (unless jolecule was the first one?), started in 2011, with experimental support for el. den. visualization. Many newer ones are based on it - iview, icn3d, partly 3Dmol,
- pv - lightweight viewer started in 2013, stylish cartoons, no support for el. den.
- Speck - specialized in ambient occlusion. Reads only XYZ format.
- xtal.js - aimed at crystallographers, UglyMol was started as its fork.
And if you don't mind Java applets:
- AstexViewer - good for viewing electron density,
- JMol - one of the most popular desktop viewers works also as an applet.
Javascript assets are usually served minified and gzipped, so we only compare the minified-gzipped versions.
Note that all sizes are small comparing with sizes of electron density maps.
Project | Net KB | Major Dependencies | Total KB |
---|---|---|---|
pv | <45 | gl-matrix | 45 |
UglyMol | ~50 | ~50 | |
Molmil | 68 | none? | 68 |
3DMol | 76 | jquery | 109 |
iCn3D | 86 | three, jquery | ~200? |
NGL | ? | three | 253 |
LiteMol | ? | three, react, typescript | >500? |
JSmol | 42+?* | jquery | * |
* JSmol.min.nojq.js is only 42KB gzipped, but requires much bigger dynamically loaded resources.