I'd suggest LogExpert ^[1]. It can split lines, has highlighting features, search/filter and such stuff.

My personal favorite for the Wintel platform (at home and at work) is Baretail @ http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baretail/ It can easily display multiple files in a tabbed interface, has a VERY low footprint, and has customizable rules for highlighting and adding visual effects to the logs as they are displayed using text pattern matching & RegEX.

It is 100% free as in beer, even for commercial use and can store both preferences & the files last displayed on a per user basis so that every time you login, you can automatically open up your active logs!

Notepad++ ^[1] comes with a 'Document Monitor' plugin which I use for tailing log files. I always have NPP open anyway so it fits in nicely, plus you get tabbed documents (which it remembers on close/re-open).

We at Grasscove built Survlog ^[1] for OS X. It handles a lot and looks very very clean.

We think being able to view log files that are remote is what sets us apart from other tailing applications as well as multiple log files at once.

Edit: I work for Grasscove :P

Apache Chainsaw ^[1], using a LogFilePatternReceiver to parse & tail the log files (and it supports filtering, colorizing, search, etc)

MultiTail ^[1]... Check the screenshot here: http://satukubik.com/2010/01/07/multitail-colorize-your-log-files/

This application is available in *nix system and mac users can even use it from Macports.

The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses).
It can also monitor wildcards: if another file matching the wildcard has a more recent modification date, it will automatically switch to that file. That way you can, for example, monitor a complete directory of files.
Merging of 2 or even more logfiles is possible.

Maybe not the best, but one of the prettiest is glTail ^[1] - you can modify the tabs on the sides with your own regexps or custom events.

I have been using http://follow.sourceforge.net/ (Java Based)

Features:

• Monitor ("follow") text files to which information is being appended asynchronously (e.g. log files)
• Jump quickly to the top or bottom of followed files
• Clear the contents of the text areas which display the contents of followed files (singly or all-at-once)
• Delete the contents of followed files (singly or all-at-once)
• Configure the buffering strategy & latency of the threads which follow files
• Open files using Drag-and-Drop
• Maintain session data across invocations of Follow (i.e. Follow remembers which files a user opens so it can re-open those files the next time it runs)
• Pause log files and replay where paused
• Highlight & search for text within a log file
• Restart a log while following

For instance, with eclipse java editor, I like to use ntail ^[1]

But that means using an heavy development environment.

Do you know some stand-alone tool ?

I've always just used

tail -f <filename>

which works pretty well on linux/unix systems, but would require something like mingw or cygwin on windows.

However, the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools ^[1] (the one you want is towards the bottom of the page) come with a tail utility, among other things.

Because of the performance problems I experienced with Log Expert when on remote desktop with several "large" files loaded (50 MByte each), then I decided to roll yet another tail application.

http://snakenest.com/snaketail/

SnakeTail can tail a growing log file:

• Monitor “large” text log files
• Monitor Windows Event Logs (Without needing administrator rights)
• Multiple Window Modes supported (MDI, Tabbed, Floating)
• Save and load entire window session. Can load session file at startup when given as command line parameter
• Sentence highlight with colors based on keyword match (Includes regex support)
• Quickly jump between highlighted sentences using keyboard shortcuts
• Tails circular logs where the log file is periodically truncated/renamed
• Tails log directory where the latest log file is displayed (Includes regex support)
• Search in the entire text log file
• Tail new log files with a simple drag drop from Windows Explorer
• Filtering of Windows Event Logs using regular expressions
• Display simple process statistics in window title bar (RAM + CPU usage + TRX/Sec)
• Stop and start Windows service by right clicking in the tail window
• Change tail window background color
• Change tail window text color
• Change tail window icon
• Minimize to tray
• Low memory usage independent of log file size
• Low cpu usage even when more than 100 lines/sec
• Works well over remote desktop
• Supports Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, Win2k8, Win7
• Requires .NET 2.0
• GNU GPL License v3

For Windows, I use tailforwin32.sourceforge.net ^[1]

If you are using windows this is one good tail from sourceforge!! http://www.codeproject.com/KB/applications/Tail_for_Win32.aspx

Also chek MTAIL a very good utility

I personally really like MakeLogic Tail ^[1]. I have been going through the list on this site and comparing it to MakeLogic. I actually like this one the best.

http://logview4net.com/ could also be an option.
The sources are here ^[1].
The freeware is also presented in this website ^[2].

A free (open source) log monitor / log viewer for:

• Files and folders
• Incomming UDP traffic
• EventLogs
• SQL- Server tables
• Atom and RSS feeds
• StdOut and StdErr

Features:

• Multiple actions, such as highlight, ignore and sound, based on event content.
• Supports multiple simultaneous listeners in each session.
• Supports several simultaneous sessions (MDI).

Requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0

You can try Tail For Win32 (http://tailforwin32.sourceforge.net/) if you need a Windows utility. It allows you to tail multiple files at the same time. It allows you to stop and restart the file listing if you want to get a closer look at a particular area of the file.

I just looked at jLogTailer ^[1]

Its a standalone java jar, and it seems to work pretty well, at least on OSX -- problably on windows too.

Highly recommend LogExpert. I tried most of these here, and I highly recommend LogExpert. It has highlight, filter, search, monitor multiple files, bookmarks. It's great and it's free.

The Kiwi Log Viewer ^[1] has a working free version, but some important features are limited there (e.g. recent files list limit is 2).

I use less, either in windows or in linux