Unfortunately, sometimes the only way to debug a program is by going through its long log files.
I searched for a decent log viewer for a while now, and haven't found a real solution. The only program that seemed to be most appropriate was Chainsaw with its Socket connector but after a few short uses the program proved to be buggy and unresponsive at best.
For my purposes, a log viewer should at least be able to mark log levels (for example with different colors) and perform easy filtering based on packages and free-text.
Is there any other (free) log viewer? I'm looking for anything that could work well with log4j.
Answer
Just wanted to say that I've finally found a tool that I can get along with just fine...
It's called LogExpert (see http://www.log-expert.de/) and is free. Besides the usual tail function, it also has a filter and a search function - two crucial things that are missing from BareTail. And if you happen to want to customize the way it parses columns further, it's dead simple. Just implement an interface in .NET and you're done (and I'm a Java/Flex programmer...)