ProteinView

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Terminal molecular structure viewer -- load, rotate, and explore proteins, nucleic acids, and small molecules from PDB/CIF files right in your terminal.

Features

• 3-tier render modes -- Braille (text, works everywhere), HD (shaded braille with Lambert lighting), FullHD (Sixel/Kitty pixel graphics with PNG compression)
• SSH-aware rendering -- auto-detects SSH connections; --hd defaults to fast text-based HD over SSH, FullHD locally. PNG-compressed Kitty protocol (~10-20x smaller than raw RGBA) makes FullHD viable even over SSH
• Cartoon ribbon visualization -- smooth ribbon/tube rendering with depth fog and Lambert shading for helices, beta-sheets, and coils
• RNA/DNA structure support -- backbone, wireframe, and cartoon modes with nucleotide base-type coloring (A=red, U/T=blue, G=green, C=yellow)
• Small molecule rendering -- ligands displayed as ball-and-stick, ions as spheres; water molecules (HOH/WAT) automatically excluded
• 3 visualization modes -- Cartoon (ribbon), Backbone (CA trace / C4' trace), Wireframe (all-atom bonds)
• 7 color schemes -- secondary structure, chain, element, B-factor, rainbow, pLDDT confidence (AlphaFold)
• Interactive rotation, zoom, pan -- vim-style keybindings with auto-rotation
• Protein-protein interface analysis -- detect and highlight inter-chain contacts with ligand binding pocket detection
• Interface interaction visualization -- toggle dashed lines showing H-bonds, salt bridges, hydrophobic contacts, and other interactions color-coded by type
• NMR multi-model PDB handling -- loads first model only for clean display
• 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

# 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 mode (shaded braille -- fast over SSH)
proteinview examples/4HHB.pdb --hd

# FullHD pixel mode (Sixel/Kitty/iTerm2 -- PNG compressed)
proteinview examples/4HHB.pdb --fullhd

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

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

# Explicit render mode
proteinview examples/1UBQ.pdb --render halfblock
proteinview examples/1UBQ.pdb --render fullhd

# 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, highlights interface residues, and identifies ligand binding pockets with their coordinating residues. Press I (Shift+I) to overlay dashed interaction lines color-coded by type: cyan (H-bonds), red (salt bridges), yellow (hydrophobic contacts), gray (other).

Terminal Support

• Braille -- works in any terminal with Unicode support, including over SSH and inside tmux/screen.
• HD (--hd) -- shaded braille with Lambert lighting and depth fog. Fast everywhere including SSH.
• FullHD (--fullhd) -- Sixel/Kitty/iTerm2 pixel graphics. Best quality. Over SSH, uses PNG compression (~10-20x smaller) for responsive performance.
• --hd is SSH-aware: defaults to HD (text) over SSH, FullHD locally. Use --fullhd to force pixel graphics regardless of connection.

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