I currently run up a tail -f var/log/system.log & in Terminal to monitor files, which works pretty good. That is my preferred method at this point. I know that I could also use the Console app, but quite honestly, there’s no organization there, and there’s loads of other log files that I don’t care about.

I think it would be awesome to have a native Mac app that allows you to ‘subscribe’ or ‘unsubscribe’ from any log files of your choosing, almost like a feed reader (like NetNewsWire). Here are some features that I think would be really great:

• Ability to subscribe/unsubscribe easily to any log files on your system
• Easily clear the log display (just like command + k in Terminal) or delete everything in the log file
• Set filters that look for specific matches (using regex). If a match is found, the app would notify you in some way (Growl, dock bounce, etc.)
• Nice display of log entries (subtle zebra stripe perhaps? Color-coded, or color icons to easily distinguish between errors, warnings, debug, etc.)
• On the logs that you aren’t currently viewing, show the number of unread log entries for all other logs that you’ve subscribed to – just like a feed reader
• Ability to organize logs in folders, and rename them (without actually renaming the actual file)
• Perhaps some sort of integration with IDE’s, like Eclipse, Aptana, Netbeans, etc. that would allow you to click on a particular error if there is a file and line number in the log, and it would take you to the error in the file
• Ability perhaps to also monitor log files on servers (if proper credentials were given to access them)

If you think that this would be a good idea, and something you would be really interested in having, please leave a comment. Also, if you have any additional ideas that would make this app even more useful, post a comment for that too.

If you would be at all interested in making an app like this, while I do not know cocoa or mac app development, I would love to help in anyway I could.

As I said in the post prior to this, I have really been enjoying using Terminal for accessing MySQL databases. I found a problem with it though. If you have a table with a lot of columns, or a column with a lot of data in it, Terminal will wrap the results of your query making it almost completely unreadable (or a pain to read at best).

I found a work-around. Though it isn’t as good as it could be, it does work. It prevents the wrap, but, everything beyond the right-side of your terminal window is completely removed. It doesn’t give you a scroll bar to see beyond, it is literally gone. If you try to resize your window, you’ll just get blank space.

Why Terminal doesn’t have the ability to turn it on or off is a mystery to me. But, that said, this fix does have it’s place, and it is fairly easy to turn on and off. Here’s what you do:

Open this file: $YOURHOME/.bashrc and place the following in there and save it:

# Wordwrap off
echo -e "\e[?7l\c"

After it is saved, you can close Terminal and re-open it, or restart bash with this command:

. ~/.bashrc

To turn it off again, just remove or comment out the echo statement you added to .bashrc and restart bash again.

If you have any better suggestions for this, please let me know! I’d love to have a better solution.