Simple terminal sequence alignment viewer.
It's a command-line program to view DNA or protein alignments in FASTA formats. Alen is meant for having a quick view of an alignment without having to leave the shell. It's not an alignment editor.
Alen should work on most Unix systems, and Windows 10. If someone asks me to, I might add Windows 7 and 8 support.
To get started with Alen, you can install a pre-compiled binary via Conda or download one from the GitHub releases page.
To install Alen using Conda:
$ conda install -c bioconda alen
Visit the GitHub releases page to download the binary (binaries are not yet available for Windows).
Alternatively, you can download the source code from this repo and compile it yourself using Cargo:
$ cargo build --release
Simple usage:
$ alen /path/to/alignment.fasta
Note that Alen loads in the entire alignment into memory, so don't use it for multi-gigabyte files. Alen will auto-detect whether the alignment is a nucleotide or amino acid. For more help, type alen --help in the terminal.
Commands
Esc / q / Ctrl-C: Quitc: Toggle consensus sequence comparisonr: Re-render the screen.Ctrl-f: Find. Searches headers, then sequences for regex, case insensitively.Ctrl-j: Jump to column.Ctrl-s: Select rows and move them around.Arrow keys: Move 1 column/rowShift-Arrow keys: Move 10 columns/rowsCtrl-Arrow keys: Move to first/last column/row
No.
First, it's to pun on the unimaginative named alan and alv. Second, alen means cubit in Danish. Like using cubits, Alen is simple, crude, but usually good enough.