A users guide to Twister
Mark Bell
January 23, 2014
Twister is a program by myself, Tracy Hall and Saul Schleimer for constructing triangulations of
surface bundles and Heegaard splittings from a description of a mapping class of a surface. This users
guide will be based on Twister 2.4.1.
1 Getting Twister
Twister can be compiled as a stand-alone program, or as a Python 2 or Python 3 extension. However, it
is also included in SnapPy
1
and we recommend using this. See the instructions for getting SnapPy at
http://www.math.uic.edu/t3m/SnapPy/installing.html
To compile Twister yourself, you can get the source code for Twister from
https://bitbucket.org/
Mark_Bell/twister/ or straight from the Mercurial repository with the command:
> hg clone https://bitbucket.org/Mark_Bell/twister
To install Twister as a site-package in Python use the command:
> python setup.py install
Or, to install Twister into your user directory, use the command:
> python setup.py install --user
To test your installation of Twister use the command:
> python setup.py test
This will use Twister to construct fibred knot complements in various different ways and check that they
are isometric to those in SnapPy. It should finish with the last line being:
Overall Result: PASS
1
Version 1.3.10 and later.
1
