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I love to press enter a few times to add a few empty lines to serve as a marker. Plus, I set my terminal scrollback buffer to 10000 lines (not a problem nowaday

by anyfoo 5y ago

I love to press enter a few times to add a few empty lines to serve as a marker. Plus, I set my terminal scrollback buffer to 10000 lines (not a problem nowadays), so cmd-F in the terminal works pretty well. And I prefer the natural/kinetic scrolling of the terminal backlog to less as a fullscreen tty program. Finally, as the article alludes to, tail can monitor multiple files at once.

pimlottc 5y ago
> I love to press enter a few times to add a few empty lines to serve as a marker. Same! If it weren’t for this, I’d use less, as the searchability is often handy. But it’s funny how just one tiny (and possible unintended?) “feature” turns out to be so dang useful that I keep using tail.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  Yeah, right? It's not even really a "feature" of anything, just an artifact of how teletype support was originally implemented in UNIX, and yet I've been hitting the enter key for my own "marks" for decades.
- a1369209993 5y ago
  > But it's funny how just one tiny (and possible unintended?) "feature" turns out to be so dang useful that I keep using tail. "Dangling by a trivial feature"[0] seems to be a pretty common issue when people recommend 'better' software. 0: http://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html
- ranko 5y ago
  less has its own system of bookmarks: use m followed by a lowercase letter to set a mark and single quote followed by a single letter to jump to that mark. I assume that this means we can have up to 26 bookmarks, though I normally don't go much beyond two.
  - petepete 5y ago
    You can use capital letters in less too, so at least 52.
- kevincox 5y ago
  I found myself doing this as well and decided to write a simple tool to do it "automatically" for me. You still can't use it with less, but at least it allows you to mark "segments" of the log without switching to that window and mashing enter. https://gitlab.com/kevincox/watchlog https://gitlab.com/kevincox/watchlog

by anyfoo 5y ago

pimlottc 5y ago

> I love to press enter a few times to add a few empty lines to serve as a marker. Same! If it weren’t for this, I’d use less, as the searchability is often handy. But it’s funny how just one tiny (and possible unintended?) “feature” turns out to be so dang useful that I keep using tail.

anyfoo 5y ago
Yeah, right? It's not even really a "feature" of anything, just an artifact of how teletype support was originally implemented in UNIX, and yet I've been hitting the enter key for my own "marks" for decades.
a1369209993 5y ago
> But it's funny how just one tiny (and possible unintended?) "feature" turns out to be so dang useful that I keep using tail. "Dangling by a trivial feature"[0] seems to be a pretty common issue when people recommend 'better' software. 0: http://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html
ranko 5y ago
less has its own system of bookmarks: use m followed by a lowercase letter to set a mark and single quote followed by a single letter to jump to that mark. I assume that this means we can have up to 26 bookmarks, though I normally don't go much beyond two.
- petepete 5y ago
  You can use capital letters in less too, so at least 52.
kevincox 5y ago
I found myself doing this as well and decided to write a simple tool to do it "automatically" for me. You still can't use it with less, but at least it allows you to mark "segments" of the log without switching to that window and mashing enter. https://gitlab.com/kevincox/watchlog https://gitlab.com/kevincox/watchlog