meru

meru is a small Crystal CLI for exploratory k-mer profiling in the terminal.

This is a simple project created with agentic AI coding. It displays Smudgeplot-like heatmaps in the terminal.

Build

make build release=1

Or:

shards build --release

Usage

bin/meru reads.fq.gz -k 21 -o sample

Tiny example:

bin/meru spec/fixtures/tiny.fastq -k 3 -o tiny

Main outputs:

• sample.kmer_hist.tsv
• sample.smudge.tsv
• sample.signals.tsv
• sample.summary.txt

Examples

The examples/ directory contains a reproducible synthetic workflow built around fictional tanuki genomes:

cd examples
rake tanuki MERU=../bin/meru

More detail is in examples/README.md.