LogUI log browser build 31 has better filters

This week’s new features in my lightweight log browser LogUI tackle two important areas: initial checks to confirm that the app can access the log, and improving the filtering of log entries using predicates.

LogUI has three key requirements:

that the Mac is running macOS 14.6 or later, as enforced by macOS;
that it’s run from an admin account, as that has the privileges required to access the log;
that there are log records it can access in the path /var/db/diagnostics, as without those it hasn’t got anything to work with.

LogUI 1.0 build 31 now contains code to check the latter two, run soon after launch. If either fails, you’ll see an informative alert, and the app will quit when you click to dismiss that.

LogUI now has internal features to support a wide range of filters that can be applied when fetching log entries. These are an essential means of reducing the number of entries displayed, and of focussing your attention on what’s important.

This is reflected in its Settings, which now refer to Text rather than a Subsystem. The window toolbar now has a Predicate popup menu, and its text box is labelled text rather than Subsystem.

This menu offers the following options:

none, which applies no filtering and displays all log entries;
subsystem, which uses the text entered as the name of the subsystem whose entries are to be displayed, as in the previous builds;
eventMessage, which shows only those log entries whose message contains the text entered;
processImagePath, which shows only entries whose process name (or path) contains the text entered;
[Edit], which in future will open an on-the-fly predicate editor, but currently doesn’t filter;
TimeMachineBasic to blowhole, which use set predicates to display log entries for those features. The first two are different levels of detail for Time Machine backups, error finds entries with that word in their message, kernel finds entries with the kernel as their process, and blowhole finds entries made by my command tool for writing entries in the log.

Text entered is not case-sensitive.

Although it’s currently possible to change and extend those, that involves delicate surgery to LogUI’s preferences Property List, and I don’t intend you to hack that just yet. The next features will provide a proper editor in LogUI’s Settings, and the on-the-fly editor accessed through this menu.

Otherwise LogUI should work just the same as the last build. These new features are documented in its Help book, a separate copy of which is supplied in its Zip archive.

LogUI 1.0 build 31 is now available from here: logui131
and I will shortly be giving it an entry in my log browser Product Page, to make it easier to access. I’m also looking at building an auto-update mechanism into it.

Please let me know how you get on with this, and whether it proves useful to you. Enjoy!