alt.hn

3/24/2026 at 5:32:53 AM

Log File Viewer for the Terminal

 https://lnav.org/

by wiradikusuma

3/24/2026 at 6:30:19 AM

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...

by guessmyname

3/24/2026 at 8:19:17 AM

Wow, the GitHub mobile app doesn't preview PNGs. TIL

by boomskats

3/24/2026 at 9:01:55 AM

GitHub website does on mobile.

by ifh-hn

3/24/2026 at 10:56:47 AM

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.

by rsafaya

3/24/2026 at 10:00:19 AM

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

by Sammi

3/24/2026 at 10:10:01 AM

The problem with GUIs is that AFAIK they need to be installed on the machine the logs you are reading are on so a heavy install on a server.

by graemep

3/24/2026 at 6:21:27 AM

This is almost the thing I want and need. What I need is some sort of TUI grafana - Json log splitter/organizer/finder

by p0w3n3d

3/24/2026 at 9:53:58 AM

In my opinion logfile navigator is much better than grafana, I use grafana to view a lot of microservices docker logs, but it's too tedious for me (even if depends on your specific use case).

This one, on the other hand, is cleaner and lets you find what you're looking for quickly. And, last but not least, is much lighter.

by aledevv

3/24/2026 at 6:34:26 AM

I use vnlog and feedgnuplot to massage and plot data on the console all the time. It's even less than a tui, but might be what you want.

by dima55

3/24/2026 at 7:23:22 AM

If you're fine with CLIs, maybe my Kelora project is worth a look. It's a very flexible log processor with built-in scripting: https://kelora.dev

by dloss

3/24/2026 at 9:12:20 AM

> ssh playground@demo.lnav.org

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

by elcapitan

3/24/2026 at 7:56:20 AM

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?

by brunosutic

3/24/2026 at 8:14:18 AM

According to the linked homepage, the memory usage seems decent (few hundred megs for most use cases when working with a 3.3G logfile). There's a screenshot with various tasks and what the peak memory usage is.

At some point you need to keep quite a large context in memory to have both decent performance and useful features (that aren't unbearably slow to use). lnav seems to land at a reasonable middle ground.

by xx_ns

3/24/2026 at 8:34:30 AM

Must have tool!

by __bax

3/24/2026 at 10:31:49 AM

It's a nice tool but I really wish the configuration wasn't done in json and loaded from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME.

by worksonmine

3/24/2026 at 9:28:53 AM

This looks genuinely useful.

by vincentabolarin

3/24/2026 at 7:53:12 AM

I was looking for something like this, Appreciate it!

by steveharing1

3/24/2026 at 9:27:26 AM

very nice, definitely will use it

by yagelar