When you think of a log file viewer, what do you think of? Come on, be honest. Vim or Emacs? Notepad++ or Sublime? Do you just invoke "tail" from the command line? Please say you’re not just using Notepad in Windows. No judgment, but if you’re going that route, you’re putting yourself through a lot of unneeded pain.

I ask about these tools – these text editors – because that’s how we conceive of a log file viewer. Logs are text files. So when we go to view them, we use a tool meant for viewing (and editing) text. This is completely understandable, and it’s also served us well as an industry since some programmer half a century ago first had the idea to output runtime information to a file.

Source: DZone