Display notification when creating FASTA index for custom reference

[SergeWielhouwer]

Hi IGV team,

Thanks for all the work on IGV, it’s an incredibly useful tool!

I wanted to share a small usability suggestion. When a user loads a custom FASTA reference for which no FAI index exists, IGV automatically creates the index in the background. This process is visible in the terminal, but if the user doesn’t have the terminal open, or is on Windows where it may not be visible, it can appear as though IGV has frozen, especially when indexing large mammalian or plant genomes.

If the user closes IGV during this process, a corrupted FAI index can remain. On restarting IGV, this corrupted index may be read, which can be confusing.

It might be helpful to display a GUI popup or progress indicator while the index is being created, so users know that IGV is actively working and hasn’t frozen.

Thanks for considering this suggestion!

Best,
Serge

[jrobinso]

Yes good suggestion. It used to do this, I'll have to investigate.