At its most basic Aten's main view acts as a visualiser allowing models to be rotated, zoomed in and out, and drawn in various different styles. By default, the right mouse button is used to rotate the model in the plane of the screen (right-click and hold on an empty area of the canvas and move the mouse) and th e mouse wheel zooms in and out. Note that right-clicking on an atom brings up the ((Atom Context Menu)). The middle mouse button translates the model in the plane of the screen - again, click-hold and drag.

These rotation and translation operate only the position and orientation of the camera, with no modifications made to the actual coordinates of the model. The view can be reset at any time from the main menu (View->Reset) or by pressing Ctrl-R. Both the main menu (View->Style) and the View toolbar allow the drawing style of models to be changed between stick, tube, sphere, scaled sphere, and individual. The last option allows different view styles to be set for different atoms.

The Ctrl key changes the normal behaviour of the rotation and translation operations and forces them to be performed on the coordinates of the current atom selection instead of the camera. The centroid of rotation is the geometric centre of the selected atoms.

Atom selection or picking is performed with the left mouse button by default - single-click on any atom to highlight (select) it. Single-clicks perform 'exclusive' selections; that is, all other atom(s) are deselected before the clicked atom is (re)selected. Clicking in an empty region of the canvas deselects all atoms. Clicking on an empty space in the canvas, holding, and dragging draws a rectangular selection region - releasing the mouse button then selects all atoms within this area. Again, this selection operation is exclusive. Inclusive selections (where already-selected atoms are not deselected) are performed by holding the Shift key while performing the above operations. Furthermore, single-clicking on a selected atom while holding Shift will deselect the atom.