Viewing log files in Notepad++ 

The application I’m currently working on writes interesting application events to a log file. From time to time we need to resort to this log file to analyse certain issues in the application. I always use Notepad++ to open the log files (or any text files for that matter…). Yesterday I discovered a useful feature in Notepad++ that allows me to apply syntax colors to my log files. This feature is ‘User Defined Languages’. It turns out you can define your own language with keywords and rules to apply syntax coloring to any of your files. From the Notepad++ ‘View’ menu, open the ‘User-Defined Dialog…’. From there, you can define your language settings. When you have defined your language, you can select it from the ‘Language’ menu, to apply it to your file. You can also associate it with one or more file extensions. You can read more about this feature on the Notepad++ Wiki.

Using my user defined Log file language, my log file is no longer displayed like this:

… but rather like this:

This is realy helpful for example when skimming log files for errors and warnings.