FAQs - Manim-Notebook/manim-notebook GitHub Wiki

🎈 What are all these names? ManimGL vs. ManimCE vs. Manim

  • Manim is the animation engine for explanatory math videos written in Python by 3Blue1Brown.
  • ManimCE is the Manim Community Edition, which was originally forked from 3Blue1Brown's main repo and is now independently maintained.
  • ManimGL is just a term we use to make clear that we refer to the 3Blue1Brown version of Manim, and not ManimCE. "GL" is used since ManimGL makes use of OpenGL (Open Graphics Library), a cross-platform API to interact with the GPU.Note that also the command line (binary) of 3Blue1Brown's Manim is manimgl which is why we call it like that.

🎈 How do I install ManimGL?

To install the latest version of Manim follow the steps in our Readme, i.e. open the command palette (Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + P) and search for Manim Notebook: Open Walkthrough. The walkthrough will show you all necessary steps.

🎈 Why don't you support ManimCE (Manim Community Edition)?

I've used ManimCE beforehand and the community over there greatly improved the dev experience, e.g. CI/CD pipeline integration, proper docstrings, better documentation, overall better code quality etc. That's for the dev side of things.

However, they don't have OpenGL implemented yet. Therefore, their workflow is as follows: write some Python code, then render the scene via the command line, and finally watch the MP4 video. This is very cumbersome and I was not able to quickly iterate on parameters, e.g. when you need to change some position of an object. I quickly gave up on Manim due to this.

In contrast, ManimGL tremendously reduces the time until I get feedback by spawning a pyglet window (making use of OpenGL). Inside this window, we can interactively preview our animations. This is a much better experience since you can iterate more quickly when writing your scenes. For me, this meant more fun in actually writing some scenes and getting things done.

See also my discussion on the ManimCE repo. If you have some experience in pyglet/OpenGL, you might want to contribute to ManimCE to help them transition to OpenGL.