Saving your work

After creating a set of attractive and informative representations of your molecule, you may want to save your work so that you can regenerate the scene later. There are two ways to do this in VMD:

• In the Mouse form, press the "Save Config" button; this will bring up a window where you can enter a file name in which to save your work.

• In the text console, type "save_state filename", where filename is the name of the file in which to save your work.

To restore your scene, you also have two choices:

• From the command line, start VMD with the options "vmd -e filename", where filename was the name of the file you saved before. (Currently works for Unix version of VMD only).

• After starting VMD, from the text console, type "play filename".

The most common source of problems is when VMD can't find the files you used to load the molecule. If this happens, try changing to the directory you were in when you first loaded the molecule, or edit the state file and use the full path names where you see a "mol load" command.