Forum:Best BAM viewer in 2022

Question

[Cornelius]

What's the best (in your personal view) BAM viewer in 2022? I found this question from 2011, but to be fair 11 years is a lot of time for new tools to have come around.

The most upvoted answer recommends IGV. Is this still the case?

I found a nice overview of genome viewers by Jeremy Leipizig, but this is a flat list without preference - so mostly useful for discovery, not to find a good enough tool that's most used, though one can sort by Github stars and citations which is a very neat feature: https://cmdcolin.github.io/awesome-genome-visualization/?stars=-1&tag=

Answer 1

[GenoMax]

No precise way to define "best". IGV is probably the "go to" viewer for most. There is IGB, Tablet, ASCIIGenome (text based), BAMView from Artemis and samtools tview.

[Cornelius]

Thanks. This is always opinion based but I just don't want to miss the obvious one. I find IGV's UX could be better: no sideways scrolling, not working well with mac trackpad so maybe there's something more modern out there, but probably not in this case.

[GenoMax]

no sideways scrolling

You can use arrow keys to scroll side ways in both directions.

[Cornelius]

Thanks, that could be useful, I'll try.

It would be great if one could:

1. Scroll sideways
2. Zoom vertically and horizontally

In that case one could navigate naturally with a trackpad