POV-Ray 3.6 for Unix traditionally is a plain command line program but there are a lot of 3rd party tools available that simplify the use of POV-Ray.

This page lists various programs related to POV-Ray for Unix. It does not cover resources related to POV-Ray in general like include files, modeling tools etc. An extensive link collection covering things like this is available elsewhere.

POV-Ray script files can be written with any text editor but there are several programs available with special support for the POV-Ray scene description language. Some even have features for calling POV-Ray directly from the editor and offer a similar look and feel as the Windows- and Mac versions of POV-Ray.

• pov-mode for Emacs, a major mode for the Emacs editor featuring syntax highlighting, automatic indention, autocompletition and other things.
• QTPOV Editor, an integrated development environment for POV-Ray aimed to be similar to the Windows version of POV-Ray.
• Pyvon, another WinPOV-like POV-Ray frontend written in Python.
• Kate has a syntax highlighting mode for POV-SDL.
• Vim includes support for POV-SDL.
• SciTE contains language support for POV-Ray as well.

There are a lot of modeling programs that can be used in combination with POV-Ray, either through POV-SDL export functions or by using external converters. A large list can be found in the links collection. Here you can find some programs specifically designed for use with POV-Ray.

• KPovModeler, a KDE program that can combine modeled scene elements with hand written code parts quite well.
• Giram, a somewhat older program supporting only the classic POV-Ray shapes.

• PovMenu, a menu system for rxvt offering to select command line options for POV-Ray and to start renders.
• pov-doc-search, a tool offering full text search of the POV-Ray documentation.

For converting POV-Ray renders to other image file formats, resizing images etc. there are a lot of tools available for Unix platforms, here is a selection of some of them:

• Netpbm is a collection of command line tools for file format conversion and basic image manipulations.
• ImageMagick supports a large number of file formats and is capable of a lot of editing operations.
• The Gimp is a powerful interactive image editor well suited for retouching and image optimization work.