Log File Viewer for the Terminal

(lnav.org)

Comments

guessmyname 13 hours ago
Oh yeah! lnav is famous. I remember using it like a decade ago to monitor an array of web servers while at GoDaddy; good ol' times.

First commit is from Sep 13, 2009: https://github.com/tstack/lnav/commit/b4ec432515e95e86ec9d71... . Woah! we’re old.

This is what the UX looked like back in the day: https://github.com/tstack/lnav/commit/bce2caa654160518ec11f6...

mixmastamyk 1 hour ago
Kinda neat but I had trouble using it. Not sure what it is doing or what it is even showing me. I'd recommend a more CUA-esque interface like turbo vision, the msedit of old, or micro if it had a menu.

If I have to read the manual, if it isn't blindingly obvious how to use, I'd rather just use journal or tail -f.

Also a nitpick but the colors are quite garish, perhaps 256 colors and muted or monochrome effects if possible. For some reason the colors on the site screenshot are less saturated than the one packaged in my distro, fedora, 0.12.4.

NoSalt 1 hour ago
Just out of curiosity, is there a log file viewer that ISN'T for the terminal?
vzaliva 4 hours ago
So, I started it and was doing something but there is no obvious way to exit. I tried Q,q, Ecc, :q. I tried `man lnav` in separate terminal - but no man page is provided. `ps` shows 3 processes which would not die with SIGTERM, have to `kill -9`. But nice web site :)
p0w3n3d 13 hours ago
This is almost the thing I want and need. What I need is some sort of TUI grafana - Json log splitter/organizer/finder
elcapitan 10 hours ago
> ssh playground@demo.lnav.org

Really appreciate this way to demo it quickly, very nice!

kiliancs 4 hours ago
A discussion from 3 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34243520
rsafaya 8 hours ago
I wish I had found this earlier. Nothing like looking at thousands of EV charger logs all day to mak you appreciate something like this.
Sammi 9 hours ago
This looks great.

I've been using klogg and if you're more into GUI's then I think it's the best there is. It opens and searches in log files of many gigabytes with easy. It's a simple and clean multiplatform QT app.

https://github.com/variar/klogg

mitul005 4 hours ago
Interesting, I want to try this for debugging our AI gateway when you're routing requests across 20+ LLM providers, the logs get noisy fast. Being able to filter by log level, jump between errors, and run SQL-style queries against structured logs in the terminal sounds like a huge time saver. No more grepping through multi-GB log files.
asmosoinio 13 hours ago
Looks very useful, will give it a go.

This resonates with my use of grep+less: https://github.com/tstack/lnav?tab=readme-ov-file#why-not-ju...

brunosutic 11 hours ago
I tried lnav about 7-8 years ago and as a terminal junkie I really liked the features.

The only breaking thing was a huge (almost bloated) memory consumption. At that time lnav basically just kept everything in memory. Does anyone did that change?

__bax 11 hours ago
Must have tool!
SoftTalker 5 hours ago
I've always just used less(1).
secureblueprint 2 hours ago
This is very helpful
steveharing1 11 hours ago
I was looking for something like this, Appreciate it!
vincentabolarin 10 hours ago
This looks genuinely useful.
yagelar 10 hours ago
very nice, definitely will use it
worksonmine 9 hours ago
It's a nice tool but I really wish the configuration wasn't done in json and loaded from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME.
Duke64 7 hours ago
I'm a little disappointed that it's not written in Rust.
teh 8 hours ago
Super useful tool but need to be aware that this is reading potentially untrusted input (e.g. in the case of http request logs) and written in c++, so a possible attack vector. I use lnav where I trust the logs, but do wish a safe implementation existed.