Richard Dallaway's Blog

Controlling PyMol with a trackpad

In the continuing series of “because I always forget so better write it down”.

Uploaded image — Screen shot of PyMol — a tool for visualising and manputating proteins and small molecles.

Touchpad controls on a Mac

Single click (hold) and move — rotate
Command + click (hold) and move — reposition
Two finger click (hold) and move up or down — zoom in or out

Commands

center sele — centre the view on the selected object
get_position — the 3D co-ordinates of the centre

Bounding boxes

Grab a script such as draw_box and File > Run Script… to load it.
In the PyMOL> command window: draw_box center=(98.124, 123.441, 117.776), size=(15, 15, 15), spacing=1, linewidth=15, color=(255, 255, 255)

Object controls

E.g., if you want to render a protein surface, it’s under the S (show) menu:

Uploaded image — Object commands: show and hide are the main ones I use.

reference software