Hi Eric,
Compiling Chimera is challenging for us, and would be even more so for an outside developer such as yourself.  Nonetheless, the procedures for doing so and the challenges involved are discussed on this web page: Source Code for UCSF Chimera.
I would recommend you investigate our new program ChimeraX.  It was designed to be a lot more programmer friendly from the get go.  It has much more documentation of APIs and how to build extensions than Chimera does -- particularly compiled extensions.  It also has a git repository (https://github.com/RBVI/ChimeraX) that you could submit pull requests to if you wanted to directly add features to ChimeraX instead of creating a plugin.

--Eric

Eric Pettersen
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab


On Jun 1, 2021, at 4:10 AM, Eric Werner <evwerner@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi again,

I do c++ programming using STL, Boost, OpenGL, physics, math and more using Visual Studio (VS2015) on Windows.  If I want to contribute to Chimera development is an easy way to get a  VS solution that then lets me compile Chimera directly on my machine?

Thanks for your help,

Eric

On 5/27/21 5:09 AM, Eric Pettersen wrote:
Hi Eric,
This a Mac setting, not a Chimera setting per se.  Open System Preferences and go to the Accessibility category.  In the Display section (and under the "Display" tab), turn on "Reduce transparency".

--Eric

On May 26, 2021, at 4:15 AM, Eric Werner <evwerner@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Eric,

Thank you for the info. You have great software.  You are right I can see the menu with the in-window version. However, because the menu background it somewhat transparent it makes it more difficult to read. Granted I am a bit visually impaired.

Is there a way to make the menu background nontransparent?

Thanks for your time and help.

Eric

On 5/25/21 6:25 PM, Eric Pettersen wrote:
Hi Eric,
This is a current limitation of the Tk windowing toolkit that Chimera uses.  Perhaps future versions of the toolkit will fix this, but for now that's the way it is.  Your two options are:

1) Don't use dark mode when using Chimera. That might be a pain.
2) Use the in-window version of the menus rather than the ones at the top of the screen. The in-window menus don't suffer from this problem.

There is also sort of a third option: use our new program ChimeraX.  It doesn't suffer from this problem.

--Eric

Eric Pettersen
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab


On May 25, 2021, at 8:51 AM, Elaine Meng <meng@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:


Begin forwarded message:

From: Eric Werner <evwerner@gmail.com>
Subject: Cannot see menus on MacBook Mojave
Date: May 24, 2021 at 9:10:48 PM PDT

Hi,

Chimera is great. However in the latest download for the Mac, I can no longer see the menus when in Dark Mode on my Macbook Pro using Mojave.

In the attached file you can see the the transparent background of the menu drop down list makes it even harder.

Is there a solution to adjust the menu text and background color and making the menu background opaque?

Thank you for your help.

Eric

<ChimeraMenus.png>

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-- 
Dr. Eric Werner, FLS
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-- 
Dr. Eric Werner, FLS
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