Please see the online documentation at https://lammps-gui.lammps.org/
LAMMPS-GUI used to "live" in the "tools/lammps-gui" folder of the LAMMPS source distribution and the LAMMPS git repository. This made it easy to build LAMMPS-GUI together with LAMMPS. However, LAMMPS-GUI has matured to the point, that it is easier to maintain it as a separate package and make its release schedule independent from LAMMPS releases. It is still possible to build LAMMPS-GUI as part of a LAMMPS build same as before, but that will automatically first download the LAMMPS-GUI sources from this repository.
If you use LAMMPS-GUI in your work, please cite the following paper in the
Journal of Open Source Software
Kohlmeyer, A. (2026). LAMMPS-GUI: A Cross-Platform Graphical Tool to Learn and Explore Molecular Dynamics with LAMMPS. Journal of Open Source Software, XX(XXX), 11185. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.11185
@article{lammps_gui_joss,
author = {Kohlmeyer, Axel},
title = {{LAMMPS-GUI}: A Cross-Platform Graphical Tool to
Learn and Explore Molecular Dynamics with {LAMMPS}},
journal = {Journal of Open Source Software},
publisher = {The Open Journal},
year = {2026},
volume = {XX},
number = {XXX},
pages = {11185},
doi = {10.21105/joss.11185},
url = {https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.11185}
}NOTE: The paper is accepted for publication but was not yet published at release time. Volume and issue number are thus currently unknown. The DOI is reserved but is not yet active. It may become available before the next LAMMPS-GUI release.
Also, starting with version 3.0.0 LAMMPS-GUI releases are automatically
archived on Zenodo 
@software{lammps_gui_zenodo,
author = {Kohlmeyer, Axel},
title = {{LAMMPS-GUI}: A Cross-Platform Graphical Tool to
Learn and Explore Molecular Dynamics with {LAMMPS}},
publisher = {Zenodo},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.21035505},
url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21035505}
}The Soft Matter collection of tutorials in the Tutorials menu of LAMMPS-GUI is published in LiveCoMS. Those tutorials teach how to use LAMMPS-GUI as much as how to use LAMMPS, so this publication is a suitable secondary citation:
@article{lammps_tutorials_2025,
author={Gravelle, Simon and Alvares, Cecilia M. S. and Gissinger, Jacob R. and Kohlmeyer, Axel},
title={A Set of Tutorials for the {LAMMPS} Simulation Package [Article v1.0]},
journal={Living Journal of Computational Molecular Science},
pages={3037},
volume={6},
number={1},
year={2025},
month={Sep.},
url={https://livecomsjournal.org/index.php/livecoms/article/view/v6i1e3037},
DOI={10.33011/livecoms.6.1.3037}
}
LAMMPS-GUI is distributed under the GNU public license version 2 or later (GPLv2+).