Getting Started

VICE’s core developers are happy to consult with scientists looking to incorporate it into their research. Any questions users may have can be emailed to the primary author (James W. Johnson: giganano9@gmail.com).

Tutorial

Under examples in VICE’s GitHub repository is the tutorial, a jupyter notebook intended to provide first-time users with a primer on how to use all of VICE’s features. After installation, this jupyter notebook can be viewed in the web browser by running vice --tutorial from the command line. Alternatively, if installing from source, it can be launched via make tutorial in the root directory. To download this jupyter notebook, simply clone the git repository if you haven’t already, and it will be under the examples directory.

Example Code

We provide example scripts in VICE’s GitHub repository under examples, alongside the tutorial.

Accessing Documentation

After installing VICE, the documentation can be launched in a browser window via the vice --docs command line entry. If this feature does not work after installing VICE, troubleshooting can be found here. Documentation can also be found in the docstrings embedded in the code, and in the GitHub repository.

From the Command Line

VICE allows simple one-zone models to be ran directly from the command line. For instructions on how to use this functionality, run vice --help in a terminal from any directory (with the exception of VICE’s source directory). If the vice command-line entry isn’t working, it’s possible the variant python3 -m vice is required. Further troubleshooting can be found here.

Note: VICE’s functionality is severely limited when ran from the command line in comparison to its full python capabilities.