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Highlights Customization

dlekovic — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 10:33:03 GMT

I would like to be able to customize highlights in a way that I have separately selected background color and foreground colors. Is there a way to do that. Here is an example from Baretail log viewer that I am currently using:

RE: Highlights Customization

LogViewPlus Support — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 10:33:03 GMT

Hi Djordje,

Just a quick update on this. We have just released LogViewPlus v2.5.22 which includes a new Rules feature which I think might help with this scenario.

One of the rule actions allows you to set a foreground and background color. So, what you can do is create a filter which finds the records and then create a rule on the filter which applies the appropriate coloring. You can then hide the filter by deselecting the 'show filter' checkbox in the rule properties.

Once you get this setup, you can save the rule either as a template or an automatic template.

Hope that helps,

Toby

RE: Highlights Customization

LogViewPlus Support — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 16:03:22 GMT

Thanks for the feedback Djordje.

I understand the BareTail implementation has some advantages. It's tricky because the solution also needs to work with the LogViewPlus way of doing things and make sense to other users.

I will think about it some more and see what I can come up with.

Thanks again!

Toby

RE: Highlights Customization

dlekovic — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 14:51:32 GMT

That is an interesting idea, to have highlights being common for filters. The important part of highlighting is that it should be 'on' all the time, without need to do the filter or any additional UI access control. Parsers allow that, and for one organization like the one who I am with, even we have more than 50 services/applications, logging is common, so one parser satisfices all our needs. Even different services have different highlighting rules this all needs to be common for all of them since problem that we are facing involves rather arbitrary combination of services, that is why shared parser highlighting rules make a lot of sense to me. In the end that is how we use it with Baretail, it has only one set of highlighting rules and they are the union for all different services and applications. One thing you mentioned would be very useful and that is to be able use RegEx for defining highlighting rules. Filters could have colors, but honestly, maybe it is only my preference, as long as they have some color coding, I do not mind, actually I would not like to have them sharing colors with parser highlighting, cause I would prefer to see my highlighted color separately from search result. I am not sure if this helps, but this is only one prospective.

Please, let me know if you have anything in beta release, I would be more then happy to test it and give you my feedback.

Regards,

--Djordje

RE: Highlights Customization

LogViewPlus Support — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 12:19:30 GMT

Another approach would be to allow filters to have custom highlight rules. In this case, you could apply a template to set the highlight rules for a given file. Once applied, the rules would be global for the workspace so that merge files would benefit (this is similar to how highlights work at the moment).

I like this approach. It allows the settings to be easily shared across log parsers without being too intrusive. I also think it makes sense to 'show lines based on color coding' - which would be functionality provided by the filter. If you are highlighting based on 'X', doesn't it make sense to have a filter which shows all lines containing 'X'?

You could also create more advanced highlight rules - based on merge filters, filter hierarchies, or regex for example.

The downside is that you would need to apply the template in order to see the highlighting rules.

Any thoughts?

Toby

RE: Highlights Customization

LogViewPlus Support — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 12:04:58 GMT

I used BareTail before creating LogViewPlus. I think it's a great tool but I was never a 'Power User'.

I think we will need something like this feature in LogViewPlus. The LogViewPlus version will probably be column specific. For example, when 'X' is found in the 'Message' column, use this fore color and back color. This will make it easy to create rules based on thread or logger columns (which I think are the most common scenarios for most users). I think the settings should be parser specific as I don't think this type of settings should apply to all log files. Color coding will also need an easy way to take the application skin into account.

Hopefully, this is something we can do for the next release. I will post back here when a BETA is available.

In the meantime, I would recommend looking at templates. Templates are sets of known filters which are applied to a log file. This is different from the feature described above, but I think it may be close to what you are trying to achieve.

Thanks for the suggestion! If there are any other features you think are missing from LogViewPlus, please do let me know.

Toby

RE: Highlights Customization

dlekovic — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 11:44:50 GMT

Few words about BareTail. That is the product that developer did not update since 2006, but since is very well done, it is still an excellent tool. I am sw developer and looking at logs every day, as you very well know, log viewer is one of the most important tools for every developer. Few of my collogues and I are constantly in a look for something to replace BareTail, we even tried to contact developer and buy source code and make modifications that we need, but he is not responding. Until, we came across LogViewPlus, we did not see anything even close to BareTail, which tells that product is actually very good.

Back to your question, BareTail has an two options to save settings/preferences as file or as registry. I use 'save as file' option and share settings through my cloud folder with all machines that I am working on. Here is how does it do it:

the file itself is in binary format, I can send you one of my settings, but I would say if your application allows settings like that I would not mind spending hour or two manually configuring it.

Tool can be downloaded for free and installation is one .exe file, you can play with it and see how highlighting works. Other then that your product is an excellent tool that I might start using in addition to baretail. The idea would be to locate the issue using baretail and then switch to LogViewPlus for further investigation.

Thank you again for your time.

RE: Highlights Customization

LogViewPlus Support — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 07:04:59 GMT

That's interesting. Thanks for the update.

LogViewPlus does not currently support this kind of "whole line highlighting". Line color coding in LogViewPlus is controlled by the log level only.

That said, I can see where this kind of highlighting might be helpful and I think this might make a good feature. It is something that would need to be flushed out to work more in line with the LogViewPlus feature set (line coloring by Logger or Thread for example).

Do you know how BareTail stores this information? I think if we implemented a feature like this, it would be good to 'import settings' from BearTail.

Thanks,

Toby

RE: Highlights Customization

dlekovic — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 22:18:03 GMT

What I do with BareTail and find very powerful is highlighting back & front color based on global search criteria. Here is an example:

I find your product having several advantages comparing with Baretail I am considering purchasing it, but for me it would be important that I can set up LogViewPlus to produce exactly same views as Baretail

RE: Highlights Customization

LogViewPlus Support — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:27:10 GMT

Hi,

You can change highlight colors and row colors.

It is not clear to me the criteria you want to use when setting colors. Are you searching for text, or do you want to change the color of a row based on the log level?

Thanks,

Toby