vibe-view

Open a quantum-chemistry result and look at it. In a browser, a native desktop window, a terminal over SSH, a headless figure pipeline, or Python.

vibe-view reads QVF calculation archives and a set of common structure and volume formats. It is a standalone tool: installing it does not install or build vibe-qc. vibe-qc is one QVF producer among others, and none of them is required to run the viewer.

Tip

This site documents vibe-view 2.18.0, Richardson’s Robin.

Open the built-in water demo in the quickstart.

Start here

Install

Python 3.11+, one script, no compiler. Which optional extra buys you what.

Installation

Quickstart

Five minutes from a fresh checkout to a rendered molecule, with no calculation of your own to hand.

Quickstart

A tour of the viewer

Panel by panel: structures, densities, orbitals, spectra, bands, and the same file in the terminal and from Python.

A tour of the viewer

CLI reference

Every command, grouped by what you are trying to do.

CLI reference

Four ways to look at the same file

vibe-view is one renderer stack behind four front ends. Every one of them reads the same archive and draws it with the same code, so a figure captured headlessly on a compute node matches what the browser shows.

Surface	Command	Needs	Good for
Browser	vibe-view open FILE	[viewer] extra	Interactive exploration, editing, the vq job panel
Desktop	vibe-view desktop FILE	[viewer] + Electron, source checkout	A native window with the OS menu bar
Terminal	vibe-view tui FILE / vibe-view show FILE	[tui] extra (show needs nothing)	A login node with no display server, GL or X forwarding
Headless	vibe-view capture / batch / export	Core install only	Figures for a paper, CI artifacts, batch pipelines
Python	from vibeview import ...	Core install only	Notebooks, scripts, anything programmatic

vibe-view show is worth singling out: it renders a real 3-D view, atoms, bonds and isosurfaces, as Unicode braille, needs no OpenGL context at all, and therefore works anywhere a shell does.

Documentation

Getting started

• Installation
  • What you need
  • Install from a checkout
  • Source archives and downloads
  • Installation profiles
  • Optional extras
  • Windows
  • Desktop integration (macOS)
  • Updating
  • Repair and removal
  • Building a wheel locally
  • Comparing lifecycles across the toolset
  • Launcher records
• Quickstart
  • 1. Clone and install
  • 2. Check the installation
  • 3. Make a file to look at
  • 4. Look at it
  • 5. Ask it questions without opening anything
  • Already have data?
  • A figure, headlessly
  • From Python
  • Where to go next
• A tour of the viewer
  • 1. Something to look at
  • 2. Open it
  • 3. The structure
  • 4. Density and difference density
  • 5. Orbitals: stored and on demand
  • 6. Charges
  • 7. Vibrations and the IR spectrum
  • 8. Trajectories and reaction paths
  • 9. Convergence and provenance
  • 10. A periodic file
  • 11. Two files at once
  • 12. Save the views you found
  • 13. The same archive, elsewhere
  • Where next
• What vibe-view can show you
  • Structure and geometry
  • QTAIM topology
  • Volumetric fields
  • Wavefunctions, evaluated on demand
  • Periodic systems
  • Spectra
  • Things that change over a coordinate
  • Provenance
  • Which surface renders what
  • Import and export

The surfaces

• The browser viewer
  • Launch options
  • The startup banner
  • What is on screen
  • The Display card
  • Measuring
  • Clip plane
  • Section by section
  • Bookmarks, sessions and presentation mode
  • Screenshots, video and high-quality renders
  • viewer_defaults: hints from the producer
  • Opening files from inside the viewer
  • When something looks wrong
• Building and editing structures
  • Edit mode
  • Fragments and hydrogens
  • Building from a name or a SMILES string
  • Live optimisation while you build
  • Periodic structures
  • From structure to calculation
  • What the file on disk sees
• Terminal mode
  • Two commands
  • vibe-view show
  • vibe-view tui
  • What each section kind shows
  • Biomolecules
  • Rendering modes
  • Consistency with the other surfaces
  • From Python
  • Limits
• The desktop app
  • What is available today
  • Installing
  • First run: the setup screen
  • macOS: double-click a .qvf
  • Linux
  • Windows
  • Troubleshooting
• Figures without a display
  • Setting up a headless host
  • vibe-view capture
  • vibe-view batch
  • vibe-view animate
  • Export
  • Tables and data
  • The capture API
  • The animation API
  • Recipes

Data and formats

• Input formats and interoperability
  • Open now, or import once
  • What this installation reads
  • TREXIO wavefunctions
  • Routes from other programs
  • Writing an importer plugin
  • Before blaming the file
• Biomolecules
  • Getting the metadata into an archive
  • Drawing the cartoon
  • Outside the browser
• The QVF format, from the consumer’s side
  • The shape of a file
  • Why an archive and not a directory of files
  • Vendor extensions
  • Which schema a file is checked against
  • Producing QVF files

Reference

• CLI reference
  • Getting started
  • Looking at a file
  • Asking questions
  • Figures, without a display
  • Building and reshaping archives
  • Queue
  • Configuration
  • Exit codes
• Python SDK
  • One argument type for every function
  • Inspecting
  • The structure
  • Volumes: summary or voxels
  • Tables
  • Comparing
  • Rendering
  • Slicing
  • Reading a file repeatedly
  • Launching the viewer
  • Jupyter
  • Release codename
  • Extending vibe-view
  • Full surface
  • API reference
• Jobs and live results
  • Live reload
  • The vq Job Manager
  • Submitting from the viewer
  • From Python
• Queue integration — the [queue] extra
  • What it gives you
  • Installing it
  • Without the extra
• Troubleshooting
  • Start here
  • A mode will not start, or “No module named …”
  • The browser viewer
  • error, sha256 mismatch or ManifestValidationError
  • Headless capture fails
  • Nothing works over SSH
  • vibe-view desktop will not launch
  • The installation is in a strange state
  • Reporting a bug

The project

• Roadmap
• Release codenames
• Release process
• Changelog
• Contributing
• Project history and internals

Where things live

vibe-view is one of five repositories split out of the private vibe-qc monorepo on 2026-09-08. Each is independently installable and separately versioned.

Project	What it is	Documentation
vibe-view	This viewer	you are here
vibe-qc	The quantum-chemistry program; one QVF producer	vibe-qc.com/docs/
vibe-queue (vq)	Job scheduler; the [queue] extra talks to it	its repository
qvf	The normative QVF specification and conformance corpus	its repository

Public source · Issues · Licence: MPL 2.0