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Introduction

megane is a high-performance molecular viewer that works wherever you do — Jupyter notebooks, React web apps, the command line, and VSCode.

What can megane do?​

  • Render 1M+ atoms at 60 fps in the browser using billboard impostor rendering
  • Load 9 file formats: PDB, GRO, XYZ, MOL, XTC, CIF, LAMMPS data, ASE .traj, LAMMPS dump
  • Stream trajectories over WebSocket — scrub through XTC files without loading everything into memory
  • Build visual pipelines with a drag-and-drop node editor, or write them as Python/TypeScript code
  • Integrate with Plotly, MDX/Next.js, ipywidgets, and any framework via the framework-agnostic renderer

Choose your environment​

EnvironmentInstallStart here
Jupyter / Pythonpip install meganeJupyter Guide
Web / Reactnpm install megane-viewerWeb Guide
CLI (Docker)docker pull hodakamori/meganeCLI Guide
VSCodeInstall the megane extensionPipeline Editor

Supported file formats​

FormatExtension
Protein Data Bank.pdb
GROMACS structure.gro
XYZ.xyz
MDL Molfile (V2000).mol
GROMACS trajectory.xtc
Crystallographic Information File.cif
LAMMPS data.data, .lammps
ASE trajectory.traj
LAMMPS dump.lammpstrj

Architecture at a glance​

megane is a Rust core compiled to both WebAssembly (browser) and a Python extension (PyO3), with a TypeScript/React frontend built on Three.js.

┌────────────┐     ┌────────────────────┐     ┌──────────────────┐
│  Rust core │────▶│  WASM (browser)    │────▶│  React / Three.js│
│ megane-core│     └────────────────────┘     └──────────────────┘
│            │     ┌────────────────────┐     ┌──────────────────┐
│            │────▶│  PyO3 (Python)     │────▶│  Jupyter widget  │
└────────────┘     └────────────────────┘     └──────────────────┘

All environments share the same parser and pipeline execution engine — a pipeline defined in Python produces identical output to the same pipeline in the browser.

Next steps​