Ziplign data folder

This is an advanced topic, and only of use for debugging or to understand the details of what Ziplign is doing.

Ziplign stores its data somewhere in your home folder. The location depends on the operating system, and is chosen by Godot (the language used to write Ziplign).

They are (probably):

Windows: %APPDATA%\Ziplign
macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Ziplign
Linux: ~/.local/share/Ziplign

The entire folder can be deleted. When Ziplign starts, it will be recreated and any missing files replaced. But you will lose any changes made to your settings because they are saved to a file inside the folder.

Contents of the data folder

Config file

Settings (theme choice etc) are stored in the file config. If it is deleted, Ziplign will recreate it, filled with the default options.

Binary files

Ziplign relies on extra programs, which are put in the bin/ folder:

zlhelper, made specifically for Ziplign. It handles all the extra computation outside of viewing the genomes: reading genome files, running blast and parsing the output etc. The source code is here: https://github.com/martinghunt/zlhelper. If it is not present when Ziplign starts up, it downloads the binary matching the current OS and architecture.
BLAST programs (makeblastbd and blastn). These are downloaded from the NCBI’s ftp site when Ziplign starts, if they are not there already. On Windows, there will also be some library (dll) files in this folder.

Test data

The test data is in the folder example_data. This is made by zlhelper and is two small GFF3 files.

Other files

Log files are automatically written inside the logs/ folder. There is current_proj/, which stores imported genome files and BLAST results. It is deleted and new files put in there each time new genomes are imported. The Godot engine stores cached files to do with graphics inside shader_cache/.