UwView is a viewer and search tool for huge text and log files, with a GUI and a command line that share one engine. Search from the terminal, add -open, and the hits appear in the window, line-numbered, where you can read around them.
Open a file and scroll to the end at once. The file is never loaded into memory; only the visible lines are drawn, so memory stays flat at any size. Verified up to 258 GB / 4.5 billion lines in a single file.
Free edition (uvf command + GUI), v1.7.3.6 "Wide Field":
- uvf '**/*.log' ERROR: many files in one run, plain and compressed mixed
- Output file:line<TAB>text or --json; exit codes 0 / 1 / 2, like grep
- 7 compressed formats, no external commands: gz, bz2, xz, lzma, zst, lz4, br. 979 MB of text in each: on par with ripgrep and ugrep in all seven (uvf 1.03-1.36x faster). The gap is with each format's standard grep: uvf 2.73x faster on gz, 2.32x on lz4, 1.80x on br
- 12 files (7 gz + 5 plain, about 60 GB expanded): uvf 17.60 s, ripgrep 24.62 s, ugrep 25.38 s, zgrep 89.35 s (on par with ripgrep and ugrep: uvf 1.40x and 1.44x faster; 5.08x faster than zgrep). On plain files alone ripgrep is slightly faster (1.17x)
- One huge file, searched and shown on screen: 3 GB 3.40 s, 50 GB 50.76 s, 258 GB 261 s (v1.6.6, cold cache)
- GUI: multi-file results with a file list and up to 8 tabs; bookmarks kept per file; shortcuts; search starts while the file is still opening; encoding auto-detection (UTF-8, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, UTF-16); real-time tail
- Not a grep drop-in: regexes use .NET syntax; no .zip, .tar.gz or .pbf
UwView Pro (uvp command + GUI), for going back to the same files, plus .zip and .pbf:
- Bundles many files (plain or 9 formats: the 7 compressed ones, .zip and .pbf) into one .uwvz with an index, and reuses it from the second search
- .zip: the text files inside, entry by entry ('logs.zip!server/*.log' picks which)
- OpenStreetMap .pbf, as OSM XML: japan-latest.osm.pbf (2.46 GB) searchable in 21.6 s, then 5.01 s per search
- The 12 files above: 41.23 s the first time (writing the bundle), 9.52 s from the second. One compressed file (979 MB of text, any of the 7): 0.11-0.12 s from the second
- Drill-down, tallies, ordered search, context up to +/-64 lines, -extract restores every original byte for byte; optional editing (Edit Upgrade)
Timings: one Mac (Apple M4, 10 cores, external USB SSD), hot cache unless noted. Comparisons with ripgrep, klogg and others, with every condition and the cases where UwView loses: https://uvp.y42u.net/en/benchmarks-en/
Windows, macOS and Linux (x64 and ARM64), plus a browser build that needs no install. Free for personal and internal company use under the PolyForm Internal Use License 1.0.0; source on GitHub. Redistribution requires a commercial licence.
Honest note: the very first read still takes as long as your storage needs to read the files once. What UwView changes is that you can read and search while that happens, and never read them twice.
amru195704 
No comments or reviews, maybe you want to be first?