Looking for feedback on new LAMMPS-GUI features (again)

akohlmey · February 27, 2026, 10:34pm

Dear All,

I recently did some significant refactoring of the visualization parts of LAMMPS-GUI now allowing for more fine grained and detailed access to advanced features of dump image in LAMMPS. Most notably, support for selecting color maps and coloring atoms by property. The documentation for that feature is complex and convoluted because of the different functionality it supports. LAMMPS-GUI just provides some templates for common cases. As you may know, you can copy the dump/dump_modify commands used internally to your LAMMPS input and thus start a draft visualization interactively and then refine it by editing the input file in the text editor window and then quickly check the result in the slideshow viewer (which has been improved to support ImageMagick in addition to FFMpeg for movie output and can now also produce animated GIFs and you can set the delay between images, i.e. how fast the movie plays).

This also enables access to improved Graphics features in the last two LAMMPS releases (and more updates coming in the next release) while remaining backward compatible (you just won’t see the corresponding entries, or the dialogs/buttons/textfields are grayed out.

Packages are here:

Please note that while I am beta testing, the packages may be replaced with improved versions.

Looking forward to your feedback.

akohlmey · March 3, 2026, 11:24pm

FYI, just posted new binaries with more improvements and bugfixes (including fixes for bugs in LAMMPS).

akohlmey · March 8, 2026, 3:39am

Hi again!

This is your last chance to give the latest LAMMPS-GUI 1.10.0.8 beta test version a spin and let me know of any glitches, crashes, or other problems (like typos in the dialogs). I am not aware of (or have forgotten) any remaining known issues or viable feature requests and have implemented everything I wanted to do and it should be compatible with either the latest LAMMPS development version and the current LAMMPS stable branch. Older LAMMPS versions can only use the corresponding bundled version of LAMMPS-GUI.

I plan to make a full release in a few days and then focus on other tasks.

Highlights since the last full release (1.9.1) are major updates to Snapshot Image Viewer and Slideshow viewer. Their layout was improved and made more consistent across platforms. When used with a recent LAMMPS version, there are many more settings and features available. Most notable the option to select color-by-property (available properties are listed in a drop-down list) and to manually adjust atom and bond diameters. For color-by-property multiple predefined colormaps are available (see screenshot below).