Folding Forum

I would like to change the protein viewer background picture to a solid dark color. The current picture of the world at night is distracting when trying to see the movement of the protein folds. How can I select my own background?

In FAHControl click on preferences. Enter the following command into the Command line under Visualization: There are some other options that can be placed there, but the documentation is currently unlinked on the website. It might be findable through the Internet Archive from older versions of the folding website. I can provide the option above since I entered into my client years ago.

Thank you for your solution. Except for the "CODE: SELECT ALL" do nothing red herring, the "FAHViewer --background=none" worked perfectly.

Just posted it in Code tags to keep it from being modified. The "Select All" should select everything in the Code block for easy copying and pasting. It may not work under some browser and forum settings.

Are there any other supported properties for the background switch? Black is ok, but on some of these projects with wide open fields and scattered molecules, it's hard to see them against black as well. It would be really nice if a new version gave in app control to change the background. But for now, is none all we have to work with or can we do something else? I tried using white or #FFFFFF and that just cause it to crash on launch.

I don't know of any additional backgrounds. Documentation for FAHViewer used to be in a development wiki on the original Folding@home site at Stanford. When the home site and download site was moved from Stanford to the current foldingathome.org site that did not come along or was unlinked. There might be documentation elsewhere, but I have not found a current location.

However, using the Internet Archive I can give a link to what it was - https://web.archive.org/web/20141229042 ... /FahViewer. There may be later updates, I just went back to a year when I was certain the wiki existed.

A few more options are listed there. If any more exist, that would take examining the source code. Unfortunately that has not yet been put in the open source repositories on the F@h GitHub site - https://github.com/FoldingAtHome. Getting the rest of the client code open source was interrupted by COVID-19, the developer's time was needed elsewhere. You could write up an enhancement request and post it there under Issues.

You can use your own image as a background by saving it as a ppm file (GIMP can do that). Then set it with --background=<filename>

I was looking everywhere for how to change the background image yesterday. I wanted a pretty “sciency-looking” screenshot for an article on FAH. I gave up on the idea, but then I stumble on this thread the very next day without even looking for it.

Too bad the official website doesn’t have better documentation for these tools.