bioSyntax: syntax highlighting for computational biology

BACKGROUND: Computational biology requires the reading and comprehension of biological data files. Plain-text formats such as SAM, VCF, GTF, PDB and FASTA, often contain critical information which is obfuscated by the data structure complexity. RESULTS: bioSyntax (https://biosyntax.org/) is a freely available suite of biological syntax highlighting packages for vim, gedit, Sublime, VSCode, and less. bioSyntax improves the legibility of low-level biological data in the bioinformatics workspace. CONCLUSION: bioSyntax supports computational scientists in parsing and comprehending their data efficiently and thus can accelerate research output. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12859-018-2315-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.