ChimeraX Developer Meeting

Attendance:

January 12, 2026

Agenda

• Qt 6.9 not saving custom colors on Windows
• SciPy missing symbol on macOS 12
• Update Qt to 6.10.1 after holidays
• OpenGL ES for Rasberry Pi
• Flying edges surface generation
• Decide on numpy, PySide, Python updates for 1.12 (3.13 or 3.14?)
• Brainstorm about log performance, #9909
• Chimera not working with macOS 26, graphics pane positioned over command-line.
• Work in progress reports
• Inside ribbon color?
• Make Chimera end-of-life bug report and registration changes.

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Discussion

• Qt saving custom colors
  • Eric will add Qt code to save custom colors at end of session and restore at start of session on Windows.
  • Qt 6.9 removed this behavior and left it up to apps to implement it.

• Rocky 9 build failure
  • Zach will look at why Rocky 9 build email says it failed but it actually succeeded.
  • Zach will remove Rocky 8 from the build email, we no longer support Rocky 8.

• Qt updates
  • Zach updated daily build to Qt 6.10.1.
  • Also TechPreview is using PySide 6.10.

• OpenGL ES for Rasberry Pi
  • Discussed our long past deliberations on supporting ChimeraX on mobile devices, web browsers using OpenGL ES.
  • Did not seem we could do a good job on those devices given our limited resources.
  • Zach tried OpenGL ES for Linux ARM, including possibly HPC clusters.
  • Tom does not want to face the complexity, bugs, and poor performance of OpenGL ES on low power devices.
  • Still want Linux ARM ChimeraX build but with OpenGL (not ES).
  • Zach will test if ChimeraX OpenGL 3.1 works on Rasberry Pi. Normally ChimeraX asks for 3.3 minimum.

• Flying edges surface generation
  • Discussed including flying edges contour surface calculation.
  • Tom wants OpenMP dependency only to be part of flying edges, not all the C++ volume code, in case OpenMP fails on some platforms.
  • Zach will look into putting flying edge in separate shared library in the map bundle.

• numpy, PySide, Python updates
  • If we update to Python 3.13 we probably also want to update to numpy 2 since numpy 1 builds are not provided by PyPi for Python 3.13.
  • We want to try moving from PyQt to PySide.
  • The outstanding PySide bugs were fixed by Qt 6.10 in Zach's tests.
  • The TechPreview ChimeraX currently uses PySide.
  • Will decide on updates when Greg returns.

• Appending to long Log slows ISOLDE
  • Eric wants ideas for how to avoid appending log messages slowing down ChimeraX.

• Chimera macOS 26 graphic mispositioned
  • Eric is still looking into fixing the Chimera mispositioned graphics pane on macOS 26.

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Action Items