The "stable" version of the snap is really old (circa 2023) at this point because I have been shy about bumping it. The candidate and edge versions are more recent and should be more usable.

Thanks for your time.

Can you elaborate a little more? lnav behaves like a pager with the conventional hotkeys for basic stuff. I'm not sure what else you are expecting.

> Also a nitpick but the colors are quite garish

I enjoy colors, so there's a lot going on by default. There are several themes builtin. You can configure the "grayscale" theme by running:

    :config /ui/theme grayscale

> but there is no obvious way to exit. I tried Q,q

It's not very responsive during initial indexing, which is something I need to improve. Pressing `q` should work to exit in general, though. Pressing CTRL-C three times in quick succession will force quit it.

It would help to know which version you tried. Things have gotten better over the years.

> I tried `man lnav` in separate terminal - but no man page is provided.

A man page exists, but only contains basic information. The builtin help text is much more extensive and can be viewed by running:

    lnav -H

> `ps` shows 3 processes which would not die with SIGTERM, have to `kill -9`.

Older versions of lnav would use readline for the prompt and had to run it in a separate process because of "reasons". More recent versions have a custom prompt and don't require the extra processes.

[1] - https://lnav.org/2013/09/10/competing-with-tail.html

lnav has never really kept the contents of files in memory. It does build an index of every line in a file. One exception is that it will decompress small gzip files and keep them in memory as a tradeoff from decompressing on the fly.

The memory consumption has never been a problem for me. So, it's not something I've ever focused on.

A new project called logana[2] is written in Rust and is headed in a good direction. Use/contribute to that if you're really interested.

[1] - https://github.com/tstack/lnav/tree/master/src/third-party/l...

[2] - https://github.com/pauloremoli/logana/

As far as following the tail of the file: if the focused line is at the end of the file, the display will scroll automatically; otherwise, the display will stick to the current position. Also, if there is a search active, matches in the new data will be found and highlighted.

I would say it's a bad UX and not just odd. I can't see any benefit to making it modal. It should just load new data as it becomes available without making the user do anything.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_8uHtL6V0Y

I think the lack of entropy right after boot can also be a problem for the RNG. But, maybe that has been solved in more modern hardware.

Oh, oh, I get to talk about my favorite bug!

I was working on network-booting servers with iPXE and we got a bug saying that things were working fine until the cluster size went over 4/5 machines. In a larger cluster, machines would not come up from a reboot. I thought QA was just being silly, why would the size of the cluster matter? I took a closer look and, sure enough, was able to reproduce the bug. Basically, the machine would sit there stuck trying to download the boot image over TCP from the server.

After some investigation, it turned out to be related to the heartbeats sent between machines (they were ICMP pings). Since iPXE is a very nice and fancy bootloader, it will happily respond to ICMP pings. Note that, in order to do this, it would do an ARP to find address to send the response to. Unfortunately, the size of the ARP cache was pretty small since this was "embedded" software (take a guess how big the cache was...). Essentially, while iPXE was downloading the image, the address of the image server would get pushed out of the ARP cache by all these heartbeats. Thus, the download would suffer since it had to constantly pause to redo the ARP request. So, things would work with a smaller cluster size since the ARP cache was big enough to keep track of the download server and the peers in the cluster.

I think I "fixed" it by responding to the ICMP using the source MAC address (making sure it wasn't broadcast) rather than doing an ARP.

The flag simply acknowledges that certain people have the right to exist. Extrapolating anything else out of that is you being weird.

> I've been hearing claims of the necessity of doing so for over a decade.

It seems to be necessary because you want to "turn the power of the state against you". All because of a rainbow?

> We won the last election.

Did the whole of humanity have an election that I missed? Just because an election at one time and in one place went one way or the other doesn't mean much to something that is global. If you're speaking of the US Election, a certain person didn't even get 50% of the vote. So, I don't see how you act like this is some mandate that means you get to silence other people.

> We can and will, with sadness but determination power, turn the power of the state against you and make you leave us the hell alone.

You don't seem sad about this at all.

My small site now sports a flag because it is clear it is needed. Are you going to come after me too?

> Don't trouble yourselves with removing the flag. We will be removing it for you soon enough.

They are very much talking about the government doing this.

I added a similar "get results as you type" feature to the SQLite integration in the Logfile Navigator (lnav)[2]. When entering PRQL queries, the preview will show the results for the current and previous stages of the pipeline. When you move the cursor around, the previews update accordingly. I was waiting years for something like PRQL to implement this since doing it with regular SQL requires more knowledge of the syntax and I didn't want to go down that path.

[1] - https://prql-lang.org [2] - https://lnav.org/2024/03/29/prql-support.html

TIL awk patterns can be more than just regexes and can be combined with boolean operators. I've written a bit of awk and never realized this.

I agree wholeheartedly and do, in fact, read them in bed. I transitioned to the Wayfarers after souring on The Expanse (I enjoyed most parts of those books, but the black ooze is not for me). The low-stakes, slice-of-life content is more up my alley.