Show HN: PyMOL-RS – Rust reimplementation of PyMOL with modern rendering

Well, it happened. After endless release candidates, we've finally made it to v0.1.0.

What's inside:

GPU-accelerated rendering with WebGPU shaders, shadows, and goodies like silhouette edges and a special soft-light mode

Core operations run up to 1000x faster than the original PyMOL. Surface generation that used to send you on a coffee run now finishes the moment you hit the button

Full PyMOL selection algebra support — 95+ keywords, boolean logic, distance/expansion operators, slash-macros

Distance, angle, and dihedral measurements, atom labels — everything you need for structural analysis

Python API — from pymol_rs import cmd and you're right at home

PDB, mmCIF, BinaryCIF, SDF/MOL, MOL2, XYZ, GRO — read and write, automatic format detection, transparent gzip decompression

Scenes, movies, ray tracing — all on the GPU

Kabsch superposition, CE alignment, RMSD, DSS, symmetry across all 230 space groups

Out of PyMOL's 798 original settings, some number of them actually work. Nobody knows exactly how many, but it's definitely in the hundreds. Plus we've added new settings that the original never had — like per-chain surface generation

13 independent crates — if you're writing Rust, you can use just the selection parser, the file readers, or the full GUI. No monolith