Console.app alternative for Terminal

Question

Is there a neater way to follow console messages in Terminal rather than tail -f tons of logs?

Answer 1

Yes. The syslog(1) command-line tool lets you run detailed queries against the Apple System Logger (ASL) database, which is the central clearing house for all* log messages. See the man page. To exactly emulate seeing just the console log stream, use:

syslog -C -w all

*all: Some apps still open and write their own log files directly instead of using the ASL facilities. ASL can't see those.