For those of you who don't like reading manuals, here is a quick introduction to VMD. To start it type vmd on the command line of your shell (Unix), or start it by clicking the VMD icon in your desktop or Start menu (Microsoft Windows). VMD should start up in a window titled vmd console, a display window entitled OpenGL Display, and a button bar entitled main. Text commands are typed in the console window, graphics are displayed and manipulated in the display window, and most commands are available from the menu interface, accessible through the button bar. (The menus are built on the Forms or FLTK library so all future references in the documentation will refer to them as forms and not menus.) All the forms except the main form can be turned off by pressing the button in the center top. There are two ways to perform almost all functions in VMD, either use the forms or the text console. Some of the more sophisticated commands, such as Tcl scripting, are only available in the text interface.