[Chimera-users] Reading Chimera source ...?

[Boris Steipe]

Thanks Tom -
I solved what I needed to. In addition to what you and Elaine had mentioned, Forbes Burkowki's book and scripts were very helpful. It's a steep learning curve overall - but great when it works!

Cheers,
Boris



On Nov 17, 2014, at 6:37 PM, Tom Goddard <goddard at sonic.net> wrote:

> Hi Boris,
> 
> Unfortunately Python programming in Chimera is not well documented.  The “sel” variable means Selection, they are defined in chimera/share/selection/__init__.py.  An example using Chimera selections is giving in the chimera-dev mailing list post
> 
> 	http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/pipermail/chimera-dev/2014/001157.html
> 
> with Python code
> 
> 	http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/trac/chimera/attachment/wiki/Scripts/atomdist.py
> 
>  Tom
> 
> 
> On Nov 14, 2014, at 8:27 PM, Boris Steipe wrote:
> 
>> Hi -
>> 
>> I'm new to writing Chimera code; I've started poking around in the sample scripts and the modules but and I find it a bit slow to find my way around. For example I would like to perform some simple calculations on the coordinates of a set of selected atoms, and I see many functions that take a "sel" argument, but I can't seem to find documentation on exactly what that argument is expected to contain, or the function that would return such a selection list (is it even a list) of objects. I'm sure if I spend more time, through trial and error and dir() and grep, I'll eventually figure it out, but I wonder if there isn't a more principled approach - a document on the big picture of how the code is structured, and/or a searchable list of all functions? What's the best strategy to start reading and coding Chimera scripts?
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> Boris
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>