Install and launch

All tools of the QuickView family are available as Conda and PyPI packages as well as pre-compiled desktop bundles for various OS's including Mac, Windows, and Linux. The table below summarizes where the different packages and bundles can be found.

Tool name	Desktop bundle	conda package name	Conda	PyPI
QuickView	Download page	e3sm-quickview
QuickCompare	Download page	e3sm_compareview

Note: The contents below were written with desktop and laptop computers in mind.

Users who would like to use our tools installed at NERSC can find information in a quickstart guide. Users who would like to install their own copy at NERSC can follow this example.

Desktop bundles

To deliver pre-compiled standalone desktop applications, we use PyInstaller and Tauri to bundle each of our Python-based tools and their dependencies into a standalone graphical application. The creation of such a bundle is done by triggering a release using GitHub Actions. Hence, the bundles are available from the corresponding GitHub repo's Releases page. The links are given in the summary table above.

ATTENTION Mac Users!!

The binaries compiled for Macs have not been signed using an Apple Developer ID. Hence, after downloading a binary for Mac, the user needs to use the following command to remove quarantine on the binary.

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine <your_filename>.dmg

Also note that the first execution of the app will take a while as macOS will check and validate the full application file tree.

Conda installation

As our tools depend on ParaView and require specific features in Python, we use conda to facilitate the setup.

Initial installation

For example, to create a conda environment named quickview-env then install QuickView and QuickCompare, we can use the following commands:

conda create --name quickview-env python=3.13
conda activate quickview-env
conda install conda-forge::e3sm-quickview
conda install conda-forge::e3sm_compareview

Updating to new versions

To update the tools to newer versions, first find the most recent version numbers using the links in the summary table above, then use the following commands, replacing the version numbers by what you need:

conda activate quickview-env
conda install "e3sm-quickview>=2.1.1"
conda install "e3sm_compareview>=1.3.4"

Launching a tool installed via conda

To use the tools installed via conda, open a Terminal window and activate the conda environment using

 conda activate quickview-env

Then, in the same window, use one of the following depending on which tool you'd like to use

quickview -p 0

quickcompare -p 0

After some seconds, the Terminal window should indicate that the app has loaded various plugins, and then provide an URL similar to http://localhost:50329/ (your actual number will likely be different). Enter the URL into a web brower to access the graphical UL.

Tip: First execution on macOS

On macOS, the first execution after installation via conda will also take a while (e.g., a minute or more), as the system will validate each Python file for security. But any following execution should be very quick (a few seconds).