UCSF ChimeraX Early Access

UCSF ChimeraX is the next-generation visualization program from the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics at UC San Francisco, following UCSF Chimera.

Features

Compared to Chimera, ChimeraX has a more modern user interface, better graphics, and much faster handling of large structures. For more information, see:

ChimeraX Advantages, User Guide, Documentation Index, Change Log
UCSF ChimeraX: Meeting Modern Challenges in Visualization and Analysis. (Goddard et al., Prot Sci. 2018)
Integrative Modeling Demo (2016)
Structures at the Experimental Forefront (2016)
Next-Generation Graphics (2015)

Although similar in many aspects, ChimeraX is not backward compatible with Chimera and does not read Chimera session files.

Missing Features

While ChimeraX has several completely new features and other advantages, it will not substantially replace Chimera for some time. Current capabilities are somewhat limited and mostly implemented as commands only (not yet as graphical interfaces). Missing features relative to Chimera include calculation of axes/planes/centroids, Segger map segmentation, volume eraser, dock prep, “worms” to show residue attributes, per-model clipping, trajectory analysis other than simple playback, structure building, rotamers, interface to homology modeling, and many others. Chimera capabilities grew significantly over several years, and likewise, ChimeraX will contain more and more of these important features as development proceeds.

Downloads

Download is free for academic, government, nonprofit, and personal use; commercial users, please see licensing.
Using a newer computer (≤ 3 years old) is recommended for ChimeraX because it employs graphics features that require or work best on a recent system.
ChimeraX commands and their syntax may change.

Daily Builds
Releases
Platform Notes

Daily Builds

Daily builds are generated automatically each night from the development source code (see the change log). While a given build may have unforeseen problems, these are often fixed by the next day.

Operating System	Distribution	Notes
Windows 10 64-bit	chimerax-daily.exe fetching build information...	Download is a Windows installer. Tested on Windows 10. See Windows notes below.
macOS 10.12 64-bit	chimerax-daily.dmg fetching build information...	Download is a disk image containing the application. Tested on macOS 10.12. This application does not run on 10.11 or older dues to operating system changes.
Generic Linux 64-bit	chimerax-daily.tar.gz fetching build information...	Download is a tarball of the chimerax application directory. ChimeraX executable is chimerax/bin/ChimeraX. Tested on Ubuntu 16.10 and Fedora 25. See Generic Linux notes below.
Ubuntu 16.04 (Linux) 64-bit	chimerax-daily.deb fetching build information...	Download is a Ubuntu 16.04 ucsf-chimerax-daily package. Install with: `sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/chimerax-daily.deb` ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax-daily.
Ubuntu 18.04 (Linux) 64-bit	chimerax-daily.deb fetching build information...	Download is a Ubuntu 18.04 ucsf-chimerax-daily package. Install with: `sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/chimerax-daily.deb` ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax-daily.
Red Hat/CentOS 7 (Linux) 64-bit	chimerax-daily.rpm fetching build information...	Download is a Red Hat/CentOS 7 ucsf-chimerax-daily package. Install with: `sudo yum install ~/Downloads/chimerax-daily.rpm` ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax-daily.

Releases

Releases are snapshots of the application that have been gently tested. They are provided so that users can fetch the same version of the application over time. To try out the latest features, please use the daily builds.

Release 0.8 (December 17, 2018)

Release 0.8 new features include:

ringfill options in style command
Improvements for multi-user VR
Select menu
Mac trackpad gestures
Startup commands
Measure map statistics, surface-enclosed volumes

See the change log for a more complete list.

The planned schedule is for a new 0.x release every two months or so, with daily builds providing the latest, but less tested, features.

Operating System	Distribution	Notes
Windows 10 64-bit	chimerax-0.8.exe built: 2018-12-17 15:23:40 PDT committed: 2018-12-17 14:26:30 PDT size: 421 MiB md5: 37ad1d4684b5eb992c279a829146c930	Download is a Windows installer. Tested on Windows 10. See Windows notes below.
macOS 10.12 64-bit	chimerax-0.8.dmg built: 2018-12-17 15:45:37 PDT committed: 2018-12-17 14:26:30 PDT size: 278 MiB md5: 463f0eb3d425126cb7da7058a9506594	Download is a disk image containing the application. Tested on macOS 10.12. This application does not run on 10.11 or older dues to operating system changes.
Generic Linux 64-bit	chimerax-0.8.tar.gz built: 2018-12-17 16:19:16 PDT committed: 2018-12-17 14:26:30 PDT size: 294.2 MiB md5: 49b2ba7db5ffa9dd26e8f9d2538e4c25	Download is a tarball of the chimerax application directory. ChimeraX executable is chimerax/bin/ChimeraX. Tested on Ubuntu 16.10 and Fedora 25. See Linux notes below.
Ubuntu 16.04 (Linux) 64-bit	ucsf-chimerax_0.8_amd64.deb built: 2018-12-18 01:52:21 PDT committed: 2018-12-17 14:26:30 PDT size: 200.1 MiB md5: bb9c263e977577fcdded6a5b57ee2f10	Download is a Ubuntu 16.04 ucsf-chimerax package. Install with: `sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/ucsf-chimerax_0.8_amd64.deb` ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax.
Ubuntu 18.04 (Linux) 64-bit	ucsf-chimerax_0.8_amd64.deb built: 2018-12-18 01:43:19 PDT committed: 2018-12-17 14:26:30 PDT size: 205.6 MiB md5: d27afb4fbad8d09ec1110dca044b7069	Download is a Ubuntu 18.04 ucsf-chimerax package. Install with: `sudo apt-get install ~/Downloads/ucsf-chimerax_0.8_amd64.deb` ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax.
Red Hat/CentOS 7 (Linux) 64-bit	ucsf-chimerax-0.8-1.el7.x86_64.rpm built: 2018-12-18 01:58:46 PDT committed: 2018-12-17 14:26:30 PDT size: 205.5 MiB md5: b5905b9c0db57e981da0e5ef32e3e030	Download is a Red Hat/CentOS 7 ucsf-chimerax package. Install with: `sudo yum install ~/Downloads/ucsf-chimerax-0.8-1.el7.x86_64.rpm` ChimeraX executable is /usr/bin/chimerax.

Older Releases

Generic Linux Notes: The Generic Linux version of ChimeraX is compiled on Debian 8 using gcc 4.9. It also runs on Ubuntu 16.04 and 16.10. It does not run on Red Hat/CentOS 7 as is. Instead, we recommend using a Red Hat/CentOS rpm package. To get the generic version to run on Red Hat/CentOS 7, a user reported that he compiled and installed gcc 4.9 — we have not yet verified that fact. Others have kindly provided the resulting library files here, which may allow running ChimeraX without having to compile gcc yourself. Other Linux distributions have not been tested and might require additional libraries to be installed.
Windows Notes: ChimeraX requires Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015, which is typically already present on computers with up-to-date patches. In the future, this will be included as part of the installer.