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Eclipse Plugin: Log Watcher

I found this plugin to be pretty useful. You can set up a variety of log files to tail, and create filters for them.

Per this summary:

LogWatcher – A Plugin for Monitoring Changes to Files

Summary:

The LogWatcher plugin is precisely the kind of plugin I like: compact, focused, and well thought out. LogWatcher is only 350K unpacked, but provides all the functionality of the Unix tail program, as well as effective integration with the IDE.

Pros:

Small, efficient interface (a single view) with a good selection of features, elegantly matching the functionality of the command-line tail, while adding easy-to-configure filters. The filters are particularly nice, since they provide a “real time” simple grep of the log file that relieves most of the drudgery of parsing files by hand.

Per file settings and general plugin preferences provide good flexibility without overloading the user with too many bits to twiddle. The filter wizard, for example, allows both simple string matching as well as much more powerful regular expressions.

Easy to use and configure.

Cons:

LogWatcher does an good job of handling log files, so I only have a few nits to pick:

1. The LogWatcher doesn’t display the full path of the file you are watching anywhere. This is somewhat annoying, as I regularly monitor (at least) two files in different directories and cannot tell at a glance which one I’m looking at.

2. One of the more interesting integration features is Tasks view TODO marker generation from a filter. Unfortunately, I was unable to generate the markers, neither from files internal nor external to the workspace.

3. I’d like to be able physically delete lines from the log file. LogWatcher has a clear function, but no way to modify the file you’re watching.


Conclusion:

As a single function plugin, LogWatcher doesn’t do a lot of things, but what it does, it does well. It plugs an important gap in the functionality of Eclipse without a lot of unnecessary baggage, and without adding noticable weight or clutter. Small, powerful, unobtrusive. (With the exception of my nitpicking) It does what it says on the can.

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