Manim

Manim is a Python library for making animations precisely, in code, the kind used to explain mathematics.^1,2 Instead of moving shapes by hand on a timeline, a person writes a short script that describes a scene: draw a square, turn it, change it into a circle.¹ Manim renders the script to a video file.¹ A quick low-quality render lets the author check a scene before the final one, and the community edition can also run inside Jupyter notebooks and in an online Jupyter environment without installing anything.¹

Grant Sanderson wrote it as a personal project to animate the videos on his YouTube channel, 3Blue1Brown, and released it as open source.^2,3 The GitHub repository dates from March 2015.² As the channel grew, other people wanted the same style for their own work, but the tool was hard to install and use.³ In mid-2020 a group of developers forked it into the community edition, aiming to make it more stable, better tested and documented, and quicker to take in contributions.^2,3 Sanderson still maintains his own version, now called ManimGL, which renders through OpenGL and has more experimental features; the community recommends its edition especially for beginners.^1,3 The two are installed differently and their instructions should not be mixed.^1,2

Both are under the MIT licence; both licence files name 3Blue1Brown LLC as the copyright holder.^4,5 ManimGL needs FFmpeg and OpenGL, with LaTeX optional for typeset formulas.² The community edition also publishes a Docker image.¹

Manim is built for explanation: each object on screen is placed and moved exactly, so the same script can be run again when the numbers change.