Many thanks Elaine - I did do as you suggested initially, but I was typing drawmode, rather than drawMode, and Chimera attributes are case sensitive. 

It would be helpful I think if Chimera threw an error or exception of some kind when a user tries to use setattr with a nonexistent attribute - as it is it seems to fail silently, and it is hard to figure out sometimes whether this is because the attribute does not exist, or the wrong scope was used , e.g. p vs a etc.

Cheers,
Oliver.
On Nov 6, 2015, at 4:09 PM, Elaine Meng <meng@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:

setattr p drawMode 1 sel