VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 30 2003 - 16:05:49 CDT

Dear John,
  While you can't open a pipe to VMD, you can certainly connect to it
with a socket and send it commands that way, via a simple Tcl script.
Here's an example script that lets one VMD session control another
in real-time over a socket, this particular example is done via Tcl however:
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/script_library/scripts/vmdcollab/

Let me know if you need help getting something going...

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 02:52:00PM -0400, John R. Kitchin wrote:
> Since there has been some traffic on python and vmd, I have been inspired
> to ask whether you can open a pipe to vmd and run it by python. I haven't
> been able to find any information on how to do this by the manual or by
> Google so far.
>
> The question is actually somewhat related to the recent question on
> visualization of vibrational modes. We use python to run our quantum
> chemistry code, and I have recently written a module that does vibrational
> analysis. My present visualization solution generates a python script and
> then calls vmd using os.system('vmd -python -e scriptname'). So vmd gets
> started up each time a mode is visualized. It would be nice if instead I
> could open a pipe to vmd and then tell it what to do from python
> (interactively even).
>
> thanks,
>
> j 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078