Abulafia's manim utils and tricks

These are links to my public gists providing my solutions to common problems I faced using manim. Some of them are in response to other users requests too.

Generic tricks

• Light theme for manim. Import this and have your animation using white background and black text/lines.

• Concise syntax for manim's ValueTrackers. A little trick to shorten the syntax for assigning or getting values from ValueTrackers.

• How Animation works (more or less). A brief explanation of how manim's animations work under the hood, which may be useful to extend them or program your own ones.

• Manim's transforms. Summary of differences between Transform, ReplacementTransform and TransformFromCopy.

• Working with sections in manim. How to structure a long animation script to make easier to work with it.

Beyond AnimationGroup

• Generic sequences of animations run in parallel. Allows to create a list of animations that can be "triggered" to run in background, while other animations are running.

• Play animations in given timeline. This one has been converted in an official manim plugin, i.e. you can pip install manim-play-timeline. The repo for it is here

Helpers to deal with text and code objects

• Finding shapes in TeX mobjects. Generic set of functions to find a particular sequence of glyphs (symbols) in a tex mobject, which can be used to change their appearance, or as part of transforms.

• Latex items environment. Latex template to use latex items, instead of manim's BulletedList

• Code utilities. Functions to locate a substring inside a Code mobject, useful to highlight it, for example.

Custom mobjects

• Landscape barchart for manim. Provides LandscapeBarChart class to create and animate horizontal bar charts.

• Text box for manim. Provides create_textbox() function to create a text box that automatically adjust the size of the text to the size of the box, with severl options to customize it.

• Orthogonal connections. Create connections between mobjects that are composed only of horizontal and vertical lines. Through a custom syntax you can specify where the corners may happen.

• New LatexTip for latex-style arrows. New arrow tip shape.

Fixes and silly things

• How to fix objects and transforms in a manim 3D scene. A trick to fix the position and orientation of something (eg, a title) in a 3D scene, even if the camera is moving.

• Quine in manim. A Quine is a program that outputs himself.