A terminal application to view, tail, merge, and search log files (plus JSONL).
🎬 Viewing a single file
Screen.Recording.2024-02-08.at.14.30.42.mov
See Toolong on Calmcode.io for a calming introduction to Toolong.
- Live tailing of log files.
- Syntax highlights common web server log formats.
- As fast to open a multiple-gigabyte file as it is to open a tiny text file.
- Support for JSONL files: lines are pretty printed.
- Opens .bz and .bz2 files automatically.
- Merges log files by auto detecting timestamps.
I spent a lot of time in my past life as a web developer working with logs, typically on web servers via ssh.
I would use a variety of tools, but my goto method of analyzing logs was directly on the server with *nix tools like as tail
, less
, and grep
etc.
As useful as these tools are, they are not without friction.
I built toolong
to be the tool I would have wanted back then.
It is snappy, straightforward to use, and does a lot of the grunt work for you.
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🎬 Merging multiple (compressed) files
Screen.Recording.2024-02-08.at.14.31.52.mov
🎬 Viewing JSONL files
Screen.Recording.2024-02-08.at.14.32.46.mov
🎬 Live Tailing a file
Screen.Recording.2024-02-08.at.15.23.38.mov
Toolong is currently best installed with pipx.
pipx install toolong
You could also install Toolong with Pip:
pip install toolong
Note
If you use pip, you should ideally create a virtual environment to avoid potential dependancy conflicts.
However you install Toolong, the tl
command will be added to your path:
tl
In the near future there will be more install methods, and hopefully your favorite package manager.
Toolong works on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
To open a file with Toolong, add the file name(s) as arguments to the command:
tl mylogfile.log
If you add multiple filenames, they will open in tabs.
Add the --merge
switch to open multiple files and combine them in to a single view:
tl access.log* --merge
In the app, press f1 for additional help.
In addition to specifying files, you can also pipe directly into tl
.
This means that you can tail data that comes from another process, and not neccesarily a file.
Here's an example of piping output from the tree
command in to Toolong:
tree / | tl
This guy. An ex web developer who somehow makes a living writing terminal apps.
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me refer to this app as Tailless, because it was intended to be a replacement for a tail
+ less
combo.
I settled on the name "Toolong" because it is a bit more apt, and still had the same initials.
Toolong v1.0.0 has a solid feature set, which covers most of my requirements. However, there is a tonne of features which could be added to something like this, and I will likely implement some of them in the future.
If you want to talk about Toolong, find me on the Textualize Discord Server.
I am grateful for the LogMerger project which I referenced (and borrowed regexes from) when building Toolong.
Toolong is not the first TUI for working with log files. See lnav as a more mature alternative.