Hello,

I am Ethan Crofut, an undergraduate at UCLA and member of Professor Hong Zhou's lab. I wanted to comment on an issue brought up at the Stanford-SLAC Image Processing Workshop. I am using ChimeraX 1.5, but I have also experienced the issue where scrolling, panning, and zooming stop working in the middle of my session.

In my experience, this issue is specific to Apple Macbook trackpads (as someone else commented, I haven't seen the same issue on Linux desktops). Here are my observations on the issue:

The problem can always be resolved by clicking on the ChimeraX window in which the 3D structures are being viewed.
A scroll, pan, and zoom functions are lost if I click on a separate ChimeraX window, such as the Log, an ISOLDE window, etc., but as stated above, I can rescue this by clicking on the main window again. This also occurs for windows that are embedded into the main window, as the Log usually is.
The scroll, pan, and zoom features are more likely to break right after I use a multi-fingered gesture on the trackpad, especially three fingered gestures. I think this may have to do with the Mac's three-fingered swipe shortcut.
Sometimes, some functions are lost but others are retained. I almost always retain the ability to rotate the model using the regular left click, but multi-fingered gestures, such as the zoom and panning options, break more frequently.

I am not very technologically savvy, but my guess is that it is very easy for Macs to lose track of the main ChimeraX window being the currently active window, which causes the controls to stop working. For me, this is usually caused by using multi-fingered gestures or toggling between multiple different ChimeraX windows.

Best,

Ethan