The biggest shortcoming of the first versions of LogUI has been their lack of search or find. If you needed to look for anything, the best approach was to save an extract as Rich Text and search through that. I’m delighted to offer a solution in LogUI 1.0 build 42.

Ulbow already supports Find for its log extracts, but that just searches the text contents regardless of which field the text appears in. Sometimes that works well, but if you want to look for specific field entries it’s highly inefficient. When working with its Lists, SwiftUI is different, and its regular Search doesn’t just find text, but only displays those items in the list that contain the text in a given field.

What I’ve attempted to do here is follow the SwiftUI model, so search returns only those log entries that contain the search text, but provide support for searching four different fields:

• the contents of the message,
• the process name responsible,
• the name of the sender,
• the subsystem.

All searches are performed as case-insensitive for simplicity and speed.

The best way to see how this works is to try it.

Here I’ve simply obtained a 20 second period of recent log, with Max entries set to accommodate them, a total of over 13,000 entries, far too many to search through manually.

I left the search field, in the popup menu next to the magnifying glass symbol 🔍, set to Messages, then typed cfprefsd into the search box at the top right, and pressed the Return key to initiate the search. This returns all the entries in that log excerpt that contain the text cfprefsd in their message field.

SwiftUI can perform live incremental search, so that as you type characters into the search box, the search is performed. While that can be impressive on shorter lists, and minimises the number of characters you have to type in for a useful result, it’s costly when performed on large lists, and with log extracts can be quite distracting. If you want to see live search in action, I’ve used that in AppexIndexer, where it only has to deal with a few hundred rows at a time.

I then select one of those.

Having found all those entries containing cfprefsd in the messages, I switch the popup menu to Processes and press the Return key again. If the search box has lost the focus, the Mac will ‘beep’, so all you do is click on the search box and press Return to perform the search.

Now the window contains all those log entries containing cfprefsd in their process name. Note how the previously selected entry is still highlighted: selections in log entries should be preserved throughout searches.

For the final search I set the popup menu to Senders, and press the Return key.

This time there are no log entries that meet the search criterion, and the window informs you of that.

To return to the full log extract at any time, empty the search box, perhaps using its 🅧 tool, and press Return.

When you save a log extract in the midst of searching, the file should still contain the whole of the extract, not just what’s currently visible in the search. You should be able to copy only selected entries from a search, though.

As it stands, LogUI now has a toolbar containing the search box and two rows of settings and controls below that. I’m open to suggestions as to how that could be changed or reordered, ideally to reduce it to two rows without increasing minimum window width.

LogUI 1.0 build 42 is now available from here: logui142
and from its Product Page.

I hope you find it useful and more productive.