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:

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

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

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

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