I am looking for a graphical application to read logs with. Personally I always use less
to read logs, and it fulfills my need 100%. However selling "Why don't you use this text mode command with no visible menus and it has to be started manually
from the command line. It works really well!" to my colleagues is never going to fly (in the general case, I might find some exceptions).
The feature I consider to be absolutely critical for being suitable to read logs is that when searching for something, the application should highlight all the matches within the text that is visible on the screen.
If I am looking at say 50 lines of a log and within those there are around 20 matches of all the different phrases I am searching for (using regular expressions), there is absolutely no way I want to click next, next, next, next, ... to go though them one by one. I want to have them highlighted all at once. This is an absolute requirement for being a usable log reading application (less does this by default, I am not even sure if it is possible to turn off).
The second feature I want is that after highlighting all matches on the screen, when I search for next, it should skip all the matches on the screen (like less -a does).
This is possible to live without, because I could just press page-down and then next, but this is incredible much more awkward than just having next do the right thing.
Do you have suggestions for a free viewer or editor that supports this?
I have tested a few applications, but they all fail:
Only one single match highlight
- JEdit
- ConTEXT
- Notepad++ It will highlighting all matches on screen if you double click on some text, but not for matches from the search dialog. And besides, it has a severely limited regex support: no support for
|, which makes it completely unfit for this purpose. - Large Text File Viewer
- Kiwi Log Viewer
Fails to install as non-admin (i.e. not tested (see comment below))
