[justusthane]

> I start them up and they don't behave like I would expect when pressing hotkeys

That's funny, because that's been my experience with lnav! Not saying there's anything wrong with it though.

It's been a while since last time I tried it so I don't recall the exact stumbling blocks I ran into, but I think it was mostly around hotkeys not doing what I expected, lnav not recognizing log types I think it should have (Apache/Tomcat), and not correctly loading custom log parsers.

If you don't mind next time I try it I can give you more concrete info.

[tstack]

> That's funny, because that's been my experience with lnav! Not saying there's anything wrong with it though.

I tried to use the hotkeys from less/more/vim so that it would be somewhat familiar. I think people are frequently tripped up if files are not recognized as a log and just treated as text. Files treated as plain text are separated from log files, so it can be a bit confusing. Not entirely sure how to improve the experience there.

> lnav not recognizing log types I think it should have (Apache/Tomcat)

There are quite a few log formats builtin. But, since log output formats can be customized by admins, it's possible they deviate from the builtin ones and things won't "just work".

> not correctly loading custom log parsers

I've tried to improve error messages a bunch[1] and make it easier to trouble shoot configuration issues[2]. I'm sure more could be done, I just don't quite know what folks are tripping over without feedback.

> If you don't mind next time I try it I can give you more concrete info.

Feel free to file github issues or email [e-mail]

[1] - https://lnav.org/2022/08/04/pretty-errors.html

[2] - https://lnav.org/2023/08/04/config-dump.html

[ttyprintk]

You're too modest. I wrote a custom format correctly on the first try; CouchDB. Keys are chosen rationally. People won't care about SQL until they realize that the later lnav versions allow `;select * from access_log where 0x00 in decode(log_body, 'base64')`