Notepad++ 6.9.2 released (tail -f) | Hacker News Reader

Notepad++ 6.9.2 released (tail -f)

notepad-plus-plus.org

113 pointsbased234 comments

Just a reminder that less(1) also does tail -f by pressing the 'F' key,

> Scroll forward, and keep trying to read when the end of file is reached. Normally this command would be used when already at the end of the file. It is a way to monitor the tail of a file which is growing while it is being viewed. (The behavior is similar to the "tail -f" command.)

This is why I prefer less to tail. You can do 'F' to have a constantly updated log, and 'Ctrl-C' to stop updating it when you see something odd and the go back to the live update with 'F' again. All without exiting less.

I didn't know that. Incredibly useful, thanks!

For bonus points, you can put in a search ('/' + your search phrase), start tailing with 'F' (by the way, that's a capital F, so shift + F key), and have it highlight matching strings as stuff streams in. Makes it easy to spot things if the log is fast-moving.

TailBlazer[0] I guess is the most interesting of the "tail -f" apps for Windows that I've tried. My usage is pretty mundane though, so YMMV.

[0] https://github.com/RolandPheasant/TailBlazer

Wow. How did I not know about this.

Thank-you for making my day.

This looks very promising. kudos to the author and thanks for sharing.

Wow, looks great! I wonder how does it compare to unix tool when it comes to performance in working with large files.

This Project is really nicely managed, this closed PR left me with a big smile on my face. He seems to be really a nice guy: https://github.com/RolandPheasant/TailBlazer/pull/105

Been using far manager for 12 years as it has this feature even when accessing files through scp.

Edit: Oh, and loading huge log files is no issue on far manager, unlike any other editor I have tried.

FarManager is great. At work, it is among the first three or four programs I open when I log in.

What's the other three apps?

In no specific order: Outlook, Firefox, Emacs, mRemoteNG. Also, mmc.exe. And conEmu. (Windows 7 startup is not a problem, usually. But opening all those applications and getting the windows in the right positions can get quite tedious...)

I've been using BareTail on Windows for years. It's minimalist and does one thing well. Scroll locks and unlocks intuitively. You can highlight lines with custom colors based on keywords, super convenient when text is flowing fast.

I just discovered gLogG: http://glogg.bonnefon.org/

Why is this trending now, this was released in May.

And if anyone knows how to use this with log files from remote servers this would make me very happy.

Correct, I remember reading about that feature before a month - although there already exist a lot of tail like solutions for windows there wasn't any de facto standard like unix tail, something that I feel will change now with that notepad++ feature!

For using the tail feature with remote files, have you tried it through the ftp notepad++ plugin? I'm not in front if my pc right now so I cant test it myself...

I realize I am biased, but I don't get it. Notepad++ and other tools are not designed around viewing log files. They are text editors. People use tools like Notepad++ to view log files because, traditionally, there hasn't been anything better.

Remote access is a good example. I am actually working right now on getting tail for remote servers working in [redacted]. FTP tailing a file is a special feature because you do not want to redownload a 1GB file every 3 seconds. The idea of a forward read-only file is a special concept. If I am using Notepad++ as a text editor, I want it to download the whole file because there may be important changes to the beginning of the document. If I am using it as a log viewer, then I need to provide a special configuration to the FTP agent. Not impossible, but the overlap in behaviour for the tool can be confusing. The additional configuration makes it harder when using it as a text editor and harder when using it as a log viewer. It starts to make the tool less useful for both tasks.

Now add additional features like grep, merging files, very large files (4 GB+), etc and it becomes clear that Notepad++ is a text editor. It is a fantastic tool, but not fit for every task.

Disclosure: I am the author of [redacted].

You're right. Notepad++ is a more of a general purpose text tool.

I got into the habit of using it to open HUNDREDS of files at the same time and perform ad-hoc interactive searching and data extraction to prep for further processing in R.

I've not seen any editor that can work effectively with so many files totaling a huge size. Would like to try Emacs for this stuff someday but Notepad++ works great and is easy to use.

Hello, agreed on your point about large, read only remote log files. I'm not sure if it will work at all. However notepad++ is a very popular editor and will probably be the first tool people will use to view a log file - that's why I talked about a de facto standard. If it doesn't cover the needs of some people then they will try other tools that may cover them - but only after they try with the tool they already use!

If you're interested in acting like the remote server is local, therefore allowing you to use all of Notepad++'s features, I'd suggest looking into SSHFS.

After a bit of searching I haven't found a good Windows SSHFS implementation, do you know of one?

I like http://www.expandrive.com/, but it costs money (50 USD or 75 USD w/ lifetime upgrades).

Or you can simply use powershell:

  Get-Content -Wait -Tail 15 log.txt

Finally, not always hitting that Ok button in the alert box.

That's quite a weird feature for a text editor. I'm not that familiar with Windows development, but isn't there such a thing as `tail` or `less`?

There's nothing built-in on Windows, just a wide variety of post-install options (possibly in the old SFU Unix subsystem, certainly in the new Ubuntu-based piece, and of course a wide variety of third-party implementations including both native apps and Cygwin).

This is a bit of creeping featuritis, but since Notepad++ is a good drop-in replacement/full featured text editor even for non-developers on Windows this could be considered targeting users who would never actually go looking for a 'tail -f' implementation.

Had been using wintail for the same till now.

On holiday but Log Monitoring for us will be so useful for us I had to share it with colleagues over WhatsApp.

GNU/Emacs has nice tail-f functionality with its auto-revert-tail-mode.

Now for non-modal regex search in file.

Or rather non-modal everything. The plugin update modal is beyond infuriating.

It's not modal is it? If you click off the box dims to transparent and doesn't restrict input

>18 May 2016

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