Avagadro: Free, Open source 2D/ 3D Molecular for Windows, Linux, & macOS
Avogadro: The Molecular Editor and Visualization
Avogadro is a free, open source desktop molecular editor and visualization tool, designed for use on Mac, Windows, and Linux in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. It offers flexible high-quality rendering and a powerful plugin architecture. It's simple easy-to-use package ready to used by students, and researchers.
Unlike other Web-based 2D/3D molecular viewers we have published about before: Open source & Free Web-based 3D Molecular & Protein Modelling software ,Avogadro uses OpenGL directly and offers native desktop packages.
Avogadro uses the OpenGL (Open Graphics Library), a set of standards that allow computer programs to make use of 2D/3D hardware (GPU) rendering features. Avogadro supports multi-threaded rendering and computation out of the box, It has interactive tools, custom commands, and allows custom python scripts.
Highlights
- Multi-platforms: (Windows, Linux, Mac OSX)
- LightWeight
- Standalone
- High performance
- Minimal hardware requirement
- Translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and some other languages in the translation process.
Features
- Clear easy-to-use interface
- Different Display Types
- A large set of measurement, alignment, viewing, manipulation, drawing tools
- Extensions packed with the extension manager
- Importing from varies apps
- Supports many open formats
- Build 2D molecule models
- Build 3D molecule models
- Insert, build, modify pre-built modules (DNA, RNA, Fragment, SMILES, Peptide, Polymer)
- Viewing Electrostatic Potential Maps
- Building Carbon Nanotubes
- Viewing Spectral Properties
- Using Atoms-In-Molecules (Bader) Analysis - QTAIM and WFN
- Molecule-Surface Interactions
- Coloring tools
Tools
- Navigation tools
- Bond Centric Manipulate Tool
- Drawing tools
- Manipulate tool
- Selection tools
- Auto-rotate tool
- Auto-Optimize tool
- Measure tools
- Align tools
Education
Avogadro's team provides a set of tutorials for developers to help them, compile it from source, build, & contribute their extensions, they release clear API documentation.
Avogadro's Design Philosophy
Avogadro started with a single idea. All great editors are improved by plugins.
Under the hood
Avogadro uses Open Babel "The Open Source Chemistry Toolbox", which provides flexibility and collaboration among other software/ formats and allowing anyone to search, convert, analyze, or store data from molecular modeling, chemistry, solid-state materials, biochemistry, or related areas.
Open Babel is a preferable open source chemistry package that runs on multiple platforms including Windows, macOS, & Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RedHat). It comes with GUI and command-line interfaces. It has been used in more than 30 projects including open source and commercial solutions.
Help Avogadro
Avogadro is an open source project, aiming to be used all over the world with no restrictions, by developers, researchers, & students. How to help Avogadro:
- Spread the word
- Contribute with the documentation
- Write tutorials for students, developers, & researchers
- Share your thoughts
- Join the effort to translate Avogadro to your language
- Report bugs
- Request Features and improvements
Avogadro is reachable through Github, IRC (#avogadro), twitter.
License
Avogadro is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Download
- The App for macOS, Linux, & Windows.
- The Code.
