MacMolPlt is:

• A modern graphics program for plotting 3-D molecular structures and normal modes (vibrations). Modern means:
  
  • Mouse driven interface for real-time rotation and translation.
    
  • copy and paste functionality for interfacing to other programs such as word processors or other graphics programs (like ChemDraw).
    
  • 3D color display with lighting and shading using OpenGL.
  • simple printing to color or black and white printers (publication quality).
  • Output high quality images in a variety of both still (jpeg, gif, etc) and animated (gif, flash, etc) formats.
  • multiple files open at once.
    
• It reads a variety of file formats including any GAMESS input, log or IRC file directly to create animations of IRC's, DRC's, and optimizations. You may also import a $VEC group from any file (such as a GAMESS .DAT file). In addition xMol XYZ files, MolDen format files and Chemical Markup Language (CML) files are supported. Also some PDB file support and MDL MolFile support is included.
  
• Fast (multi-threaded) on the fly computation of orbitals, densities and molecular electrostatic potentials for display as 2D contour maps or 3D isosurfaces!
  • 2D Contour maps computed live with rotations or animations!
  • Compute orbitals across an animation.
  • Molecular Electrostatic Potentials available either alone or color mapped to a total electron density isosurface.
  • Ability to create density difference maps, or abitrary combinations of densities.
• Molecular point group symmetry is supported.
• You may also paste GAMESS and Gaussian-92 style cartesian coordinates directly into the program.
  
• Animation of Normal Modes.
  
• Animation of IRC's, and DRC's including orbitals.
  
• Simple Energy Plots (including geometrical parameters).
• Simple frequency line graph of frequency versus infrared or Raman intensity.
  
• Append multiple GAMESS files together to create a single animation.
  
• Build or modify molecules using the graphical molecule builder.
  • Quickly build realistic 3D structures.
  • rotate selected atoms about bonds, change bond or dihedral angles.
  • translate and rotate selected subgroups.
• Build molecules from scratch using cartesian or internal coordinates
  
• GAMESS input file (.inp) builder
  
  • Both simple to use and many advanced GAMESS features are available.
  • Automatically include optimized orbitals from one computation into your next run!
  • Generate input for GAMESS Effective Fragment Potential computations.
  • Generate input for GAMESS Fragment Molecular Orbital computations.

Ancient History

Where does the wxMacMolPlt name originate?

• The name is a rather un-original combination of the past evolution of the program. The inspiration was the simple X-Windows MolPlt program (though no code was reused) that was re-invented as the MacMolPlt program in 1994 (so named due to it's Mac-only implementation). MacMolPlt evolved over many years from a very simple interactive 2D program on very underpowered Macs to a full 3D program with many computational capabilities. In 2006 the MacMolPlt code was ported to the wxWidgets toolkit enabling cross-platform builds on Macs, Windows and Linux and wx was added to the name. Since then a graphical molecule builder has also been added along with many other improvements.