loglook is a Windows application used to visualize the contents of a log file or text file. Given a search string, loglook plots a histogram of occurences of that string on a time line so that at a glance the user can see the contents of the log file.

• Plotting occurences of a string in a log file to give an overall picture of the contents of the file
• The histogram plots the number of occurences by time
• Clicking on a data point will open the log file in Notepad++, which can then be used for detailed inspection
• allows multiple files to be open at once and so allowing content from multiple files to be compared visually

The loglook_ installer can be downloaded from the Downloads folder in the loglook repository.

• Fixed bug where timestamp was being interpreted as 12 hour instead of 24 hour.
• Fixed bug where notepad++ did not open if the log file path contained a space.
• If you had previously installed loglook, delete the file %appdata%\LogFileDescriptor.json before running the installer.

The default installation of loglook can analyse the time stamp from several common log file formats. Custom formats can be added by editting the file: %appdata%\LogFileDescriptor.json. To analyse a new type of log file, add a new entry to this configuration file and restart loglook. Entries take the form of:

  {
    "FileType": "Simple Time",
    "FileTypeDescription": "Simple timestamp with hours to 10th of second",
    "DateTimeFormatString": "hh:mm:ss.ff",
    "ContentIndexStart": 0,
    "DatetimeIndexStart": 11,
    "DatetimeLength": 11
  }

This project requires Visual Studio 2019 with Windows Desktop workload installed, to build.

Open solution file and choose "Release" in the Solution Configurations.

• Copy the file LogFileDescriptor.json to the folder %appdata%. Alternatively, run the installer project by running the loglook-installer project.
• Press Ctrl+F5 to build and run the app.

Open solution file and choose "Debug" in the Solution Configurations.

• Copy the file LogFileDescriptor.json to the folder %appdata%
• Press F5 to build and run the app.