Using the program

Main page

The window title shows the location of the currently opened log, and the time at which the log was last loaded.

Directly below the menu bar is an input field in which you can type a regular expression to filter the log file. This is described below.

The text box below that shows the original text of the currently selected line.

Below that is the main window, showing the log file in a tabular form. The line numbers at the left are the line numbers in the original log file. Log lines might be hidden, either because a parser is used to hide them (see Customizing) or because a filter is used (see below). These lines are counted in the line numbers, but not shown. In the current version of the program, highlighting of fur phrases is built in: a table cell with the text ERROR or “Caused by” is shown with a red background, INFO with a green background and WARN with a yellow background.

At the bottom is the status bar, that is used to show error messages and status.

Log file handling

Opening a new log

Open a log by choosing either “Open log file” (Ctrl-O) or “Open http log” (Shift-Ctrl-O) from the File menu. This will open the following dialog (slightly different for a log file or an http log):

  • Nickname: a name by which you can identify this log in the list of recently opened logs. If you use a name that already occurs in the list of recently opened logs, the dialog will warn you. Saving will overwrite that entry.
  • Log file (or Log URL): the location of the log. An http log location should start with http:// or https://, and should refer to a location that provides a text file.
  • Parse specification: a file that describes what columns to show, and how the log will be parsed. Making such a parse specification is quite technical, an annotated XSD file that describes the structure is provided in the Examples directory. See Customizing for a guide.

Reopening a recently opened log

Choose one of the maximum twenty recently opened logs in the File menu. The first ten can be opened by pressing the digits 0-9 when the File menu is active (just like in many windows applications).

Searching

Searching can be started from the Search menu, or by pressing Ctrl-F. This opens the Search text input field and moves the cursor there. When you start to type, the search starts immediately. Press F3 to search for the next occurrence, press Shift-F3 for the previous occurrence.

The text that is searched for is highlighted in the text box showing the original log line, directly above the main window.

By default, searching is case sensitive. This can be switched off in the Search menu. Pressing ESC closes the Search text field. F3 and Shift-F3 still work, though.

The search function looks in the original input lines of the log file, this means that it also finds text in columns that are not shown in the table in the main window. The search function does not look in lines that are hidden.

Filtering

Move to the Filter input field by pressing Alt-D. The simplest way to use it is to enter a piece of text, and then press the button “Filter log file.” Only lines with that phrase will be shown in the table. Filtering is case sensitive. When you leave the filter input field without applying the filter, the background of the filter input field will turn mustard yellow.

An alternative to pressing the button “Filter log file” is to use the key combination Ctrl-Shift-D.

The phrase in the filter input field is treated as a regular expression. This means that you can enter a filter text like “INFO|DEBUG” to show lines that contain either INFO or DEBUG. The filter field text is used in a regular expression search, not a match, so the regular expression does not need to match the complete log line. More information on regular expressions can be found at www.regular-expressions.info, an excellent tool to test regular expressions is regexr.com.

When you enter an incomplete regular expression in the filter input field, the results are unpredictable.

Filtering takes place on the original log input line. That means that you can filter out lines bases on text that would not be shown in the main log table window.

Navigation

Common navigation keys work: Page up, Page down, Ctrl-Home, Ctrl-End, Up and Down.