TailBlazer: A modern file tail utility based on rx.net | Hacker News Reader

TailBlazer: A modern file tail utility based on rx.net

github.com

35 pointsingve15 comments

Something interesting about this project: It showcases what has so far been a mostly below-the-radar effort to overhaul and modernize WPF.

WPF has an incredibly broad and powerful API, tied to a fairly inefficient and poky rendering stack, which can be mitigated through great care. MS has nearly abandoned it, and is instead pushing the comparatively limited and immature UWP. I think the revitalizing .NET OSS community still prefers the power and compatibility of WPF, and is going its own way. This project uses Mahapps.Metro and XAML Material Design. Together, these two make it easy to build visually sophisticated Windows desktop apps without using HTML or reinventing a whole GUI stack.

This could put MS into a strange position where the great Windows apps are written in a technology that it's written off, and that aren't compatible with the Windows store.

I am the develper of tail blazer. It is a new project and once I have got its performance perfect there are loads of features which I will implement.

Please everyone feel free to raise feature requests on github

A non-gui version perhaps? I dread having to use a mouse to deal with logfiles.

See also The Log File Navigator (lnav) if you're in the market for a fancy tail replacement: http://lnav.org/

Just tried this on Mac and Linux. Looks very useful, but in both cases, the display is washed out (like Mac does when the terminal is not the focus). Makes it very hard on the eyes. Any idea why this might be happening? (running in iTerm2, BTW)

just to be sure... what's wrong with GNU tail?

I think his use-case involves Windows, without a terminal. Or he wants features (such as drag-and-drop) that aren't supported by (?) terminals.

Nothing. However I want TB to be easy for non tech people like testers and support.

> non tech people like testers and support

I'm glad i don't hire people for testing who are non technical then

There are many things that are simply not possible to do on the CLI. Take for example an indicator bar that shows notches for any lines in the file that matches a search term. That would be relatively straightforward in a GUI but quite difficult to render on the CLI, even with a curses interface.

If it can do that it isn't tail... it becomes a pager. Which can do that

What kind of CLI pager does that? Legitimately curios.

emacs occur effectively does this... you get another pane to the right with a list of all ocurrences and you can use that to navigate up and down your file. Scrollbars wouldn't work because you may have far too few rows on the tty. less et al highlight everything in the current page and so on. emacs et al will tell you how many matches are left. grep too.

Incidentally intellij does this and i find it of limited use. Perhaps just not how my mind works. The occur mode is far more sensible to me.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

This has drag and drop support. A search/filter box. And more importantly was probably fun to write and is a cool calling card showcasing some of your skills.

Cheers. You are correct on all fronts

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