What is gorder?

gorder is a command-line tool that aims to provide a comprehensive, reliable, simple, and fast way to calculate atomistic, coarse-grained, and united-atom lipid order parameters from Gromacs simulations.

The primary (and possibly naïve) goal of gorder is to completely replace the use of gmx order. gmx order is a tool still widely used in the Gromacs community despite its tedious usage and the fact that it sometimes produces completely incorrect results.1

Apart from calculating the order parameters correctly, gorder also offers many additional features, such as reporting order parameters for individual C-H bonds, error estimation, leaflet classification, geometric selection, or construction of ordermaps. gorder can also calculate order parameters for non-planar membranes such as tubes or vesicles.

gorder is written in Rust and is also available as a Python package and a Rust crate. If you want to see the code (or comparison with other programs), visit the gorder GitHub repository.


1

Even Gromacs developers say that you should not use gmx order.