manim-slides/docs/source/manim_or_manimgl.md

Manim or ManimGL

Manim Slides supports both Manim (Community Edition) and ManimGL (by 3b1b).

Because both modules have slightly different APIs, Manim Slides needs to know which Manim API you are using, to import the correct module.

Default Behavior

By default, Manim Slides looks at {py:data}sys.modules and chooses the first Manim package that is already imported: manim for Manim, manimlib for ManimGL. This works pretty well when rendering the slides.

If both modules are present in {py:data}sys.modules, then Manim Slides will prefer using manim.

Usage

The simplest way to use Manim Slides with the correct Manim API is to:

1. first import the Manim API;
2. and, then, import manim_slides.

Example for manim:

from manim import *
from manim_slides import Slide

Example for manimlib:

from manimlib import *
from manim_slides import Slide

Example of Default Import

The following code shows how Manim Slides detected that manimlib was imported, so the {py:class}Slide<manim_slides.slide.Slide> automatically subclasses the class from ManimGL, not Manim.

from manimlib import Scene
from manim_slides import Slide

assert issubclass(Slide, Scene)  # Slide subclasses Scene from ManimGL

from manim import Scene

assert not issubclass(Slide, Scene)  # but not Scene from Manim

Custom Manim API

If you want to override the default Manim API, you can set the MANIM_API environment variable to:

• manim or manimce to import manim;
• manimlib or manimgl to import manimlib;

prior to importing manim_slides.

Note that Manim Slides will still first look at {py:data}sys.modules to check if any of the two modules is already imported.

If you want to force Manim Slides to obey the MANIM_API environment variable, you must also set FORCE_MANIM_API=1.