GitHub

CDFViewer.jl

CDFViewer is an interactive viewer for NetCDF files and zarr stores. It opens a dataset straight from your terminal and lets you explore every variable with sliders, menus, and a command prompt. The same session produces publication-ready figures, animated recordings, and reproducible session exports, all rendered with GLMakie.

Example block output

Features

  • Open any NetCDF file or zarr store and get a plot with a handful of keystrokes, without writing a script or a notebook.
  • A CDFViewer> prompt with tab completion, persistent history, and reverse search drives the whole application from the keyboard.
  • What a plot shows is also selectable in a menu window with dropdown menus, sliders, and buttons. Both interfaces stay in sync.
  • Nine plot types cover line and scatter plots, heatmaps, contours, 3D surfaces, and volume rendering.
  • 2D fields can be drawn on geographic map projections with coastlines, land masses, and satellite imagery.
  • Any dimension can be played like a movie and recorded to MP4, MKV, WebM, or GIF.
  • ICON-style output on cell dimensions is interpolated on the fly, and external grid files are found automatically.
  • The current view can be exported as a command line that recreates it exactly.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/Gordi42/CDFViewer.jl.git
cd CDFViewer.jl
julia --project=. -e 'using Pkg; Pkg.instantiate()'
julia --project=. -e 'using CDFViewer; julia_main()' your_file.nc

Then select a variable and a plot type at the prompt.

CDFViewer> v temperature
CDFViewer> p heatmap

Head over to Installation for the full setup (including a compiled system image for fast startup) and to Getting Started for a guided tour.

Manual outline