Show HN: tgv: Genome viewer for you and your agents

0.4.0.mp4 #

tgv (Terminal Genome Viewer) is blazing-fast. Your SSH session is no longer a black box.

• Navigate genomes with vim-style commands (but the mouse works too).
• Rich file format support: BAM, VCF, BCF, BED, bigBed; object storage (s3); and any UCSC reference genome.
• tgv GUI coming soon.

| Before tgv: agents draw questionable ASCII art. | After tgv: agents explain the analysis in an interactive session. |

tgv organizes messy omics data to a performant data engine that's fully exposed to agents through MCP. A multi-omics analysis takes a few lines of SQL queries.

• No more glue scripts chaining samtools ,bcftools , andawk .
• No more off-by-one bugs from mixing 0-based and 1-based tools.
• No more wasted tokens.

Note

tgv is in early development. Please report bugs and we will fix them asap.

• cargo: cargo install tgv --locked
• brew: brew tap zeqianli/tgv && brew install tgv
• bioconda: conda install bioconda::tgv
• Pre-built binaries: GitHub Releases

Install tgv MCP:

• Codex: codex mcp add tgv -- tgv mcp
• Claude: claude mcp add tgv -- tgv mcp
• Others: ask your agent

tgv

• :q : Quit
• h/j/k/l : Left / down / up / right.H/J/K/L for faster navigation
• W/B/w/b : Next gene / previous gene / next exon / previous exon
• z/o : Zoom in / out
• /_gene_ //_chr_:_position_ : Go to a gene (e.g./TP53 ) or a position (e.g./1:2345 )
• _number_ +_movement_ : Repeat movements (e.g.20B : back 20 genes)
• :ls : Switch chromosomes
• :e _file_ : Open more files, or drag them into the terminal
• Mouse: click, scroll, drag and hover.

If you use a reference genome frequently, down a local cache is highly recommended. This makes TGV much faster.

tgv download hg38

Browse alignments:

tgv file1.sorted.bam s3://my-bucket/file2.sorted.bam variants.vcf intervals.bed

tgv non_human.bam -r 1:123 --no-reference