ProteinView

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Terminal protein structure viewer -- load, rotate, and explore PDB/CIF structures right in your terminal.

Features

• Braille character rendering -- high-resolution colored Unicode braille (2x4 dots per cell), works everywhere including SSH
• HD pixel rendering -- Sixel/Kitty/iTerm2 graphics protocol support via ratatui-image for pixel-perfect display (--hd)
• Cartoon ribbon visualization -- smooth ribbon/tube rendering with depth fog and Lambert shading for helices, beta-sheets, and coils
• 3 visualization modes -- Cartoon (ribbon), Backbone (CA trace), Wireframe (all-atom bonds)
• 6 color schemes -- secondary structure, pLDDT (when available), chain, element, B-factor, rainbow
• Interactive rotation, zoom, pan -- vim-style keybindings with auto-rotation
• Protein-protein interface analysis -- detect and highlight inter-chain contacts
• PDB and mmCIF format support -- including secondary structure parsing from both formats
• Fetch from RCSB PDB -- download structures by ID with --fetch (optional feature)
• Single static binary, zero runtime dependencies

Installation

Easy install via pip for x86 (for arm, it will try to build it on your machine using maturin)

pip install proteinview

or build it here from source

# Basic install
cargo install --path .

# With RCSB PDB fetch support
cargo install --path . --features fetch

This builds the binary and places it in ~/.cargo/bin/, which is already on your PATH if you installed Rust via rustup. Then run proteinview from anywhere.

Usage

# View a local PDB file
proteinview examples/1UBQ.pdb

# HD pixel mode (Sixel/Kitty/iTerm2 terminals)
proteinview examples/4HHB.pdb --hd

# Choose color scheme
proteinview examples/1UBQ.pdb --color rainbow

# Color AlphaFold / ModelCIF structures by pLDDT
proteinview examples/AF3_TNFa.pdb --color plddt

# Choose visualization mode
proteinview examples/4HHB.pdb --mode wireframe

# Fetch from RCSB PDB (requires --features fetch)
proteinview --fetch 1UBQ

Keybindings

Visualization Modes

Color Schemes

Example PDB Files

Interface Analysis

Press f to toggle the protein-protein interface panel, which detects inter-chain contacts and highlights interface residues.

Terminal Support

• Works in any terminal with Unicode support (braille mode).
• For best quality, use a terminal with Sixel or Kitty graphics protocol support (e.g., WezTerm, Kitty, foot, iTerm2) and pass --hd.
• The --hd flag auto-detects the best graphics protocol; falls back to colored braille if none available.

Building

cargo build --release

# With RCSB fetch support:
cargo build --release --features fetch

Contributing

Contributions welcome! Please open an issue or PR on GitHub.

License

MIT