If you have opened LogViewer and thought "nice reader, but I still live in tail -f" — you are not wrong. This is the honest update: where the app is today, what we are building next, and how that fits next to the tools people already reach for.

What LogViewer is today

The current LogViewer is a polished desktop log reader. Tabs, preferences, highlighting, search, themes, translations. Useful for opening a file and looking around. It is not yet a real-time watcher in the BareTail sense. Huge files still get pulled into memory the wrong way. There is no proper Follow. Background tabs do not tell you when a log has moved on without you.

I would rather say that plainly than market "any size" and "live tail" before the engine earns those words. Dogfooding applies here too — see Eating our own dog food.

The north star: A windowed BareTail for Mac and Linux

BareTail is still the mental model for me at least: open a growing file, Follow the end, keep up when it is noisy, watch several logs in tabs, highlight the lines that matter. Fast. Utilitarian. No ceremony.

BareTail (and tools like LogExpert) live on Windows. On Mac and Linux, many developers already have a strong answer in the terminal: lnav. Huge files, live tail, deep power features, even SQL over logs. I am not trying to replace lnav for people who are happy in a TTY.

What I want LogViewer to be is the windowed BareTail-class tool for macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS (ChromeOS via Linux / Crostini). Second monitor. Mouse scroll. Tabs you can see. Open → Follow → watch. When you do not want another terminal session for that job.

Apple's Console.app does not close that gap either. It is built around unified logging (os_log). Fine for system diagnosis. Awkward for large plain-text or JSON app logs you actually ship and debug every day.

What is coming next

We are doing a clean rewrite — Rust, egui — aimed at the Free product first:

• A real huge-file engine (virtual view; not load-the-whole-file-into-RAM)
• Follow / pause, keep-up under bursty appends
• Multi-tab watching with dirty / activity indicators
• Highlighting that still works while the file grows
• Same language support habit (English, Spanish and French locales) carried forward
• Hard performance budgets before we claim "any size" again — open a multi‑GB log quickly, stay lean on RAM, stay usable at high append rates

That Free app should be a complete BareTail-class watcher you can download and use. Pro comes later in the same private project (logViewerPro): regex search, filter-while-following, JSON-friendly rows, and eventually official remote options — sold as a one-time license with a year of updates, then you keep the last build you paid for. Checkout will go through LemonSqueezy from the club site. No App Store requirement; macOS builds notarised for direct download.

What is not in the first Free cut on purpose: piping app | logviewer, Kubernetes log streams, or turning this into a browser/server monitor. Network mounts (SMB, NFS, sshfs) still count as normal files. Cloud and agent-style tools already exist; we are staying a native desktop watcher until the local engine is boringly solid — then we can look at stdin.

How it compares (short version)

We are not competing with lnav on SQL-over-logs. We are not cloning LogExpert’s full analyser on day one. We are filling the BareTail-shaped hole for people who want a desktop window on the platforms BareTail never really owned.

Where to look

Product catalogue (still growing, still honest about "coming soon" bits): cycleruncode.club/products.
Club home: cycleruncode.club.

If you care about a particular log workflow — Follow defaults, JSON lines, teaching use in the club — tell me via Contact.

I will write again when the rewrite has something you can actually feel: open a big file, hit Follow, and not hold your breath.