View your DNA or protein multiple-sequence alignments right at your command line. No need to launch a GUI! Note: alv requires Python v3.4 or later. Earlier versions may also work, but this has not been tested. Features: Command-line based, no GUI, so easy to script viewing of many (typically small) MSAs. Reads alignments in FASTA, Clustal, PHYLIP, and Stockholm formats. Output is formatted to suit your terminal. You can also set the alignment width with option -w. Can color alignments of coding DNA by codon's translations to amino acids. Guesses sequence type (DNA/RNA/AA/coding) by default. You can override with option -t. Order sequence explicitly, alphabetically, or by sequence similarity. Restrict coloring to where you don't have indels or where there is a lot of conservation.

Some changes were made based on reviewer feedback when submitting to Journal of Open Source Software. Most notably, up-arrows for tick marks are not used when the console is not supporting UTF8.