UwView icon
UwView icon

UwView

View, scroll, and search huge log or text files—up to 258 GB and billions of lines—with minimal memory, background indexing, encoding detection, real-time tail, regex highlighting, session restore, exportable search, and cross-platform desktop or browser use.

The same 3.16 GB / 100M-line OpenStreetMap file, opened twice: native desktop (left) and the browser WebAssembly build (right, on localhost). Searching ?? returns an identical 6,204 matches in both, with ±1 line of context. The browser build is functionally the same; only indexing and search are slower, being CPU-bound. Free edition.

Cost / License

  • Freemium (Pay once or Subscription)
  • Proprietary

Application type

Platforms

  • Mac  Distributed as a zip from GitHub Releases (Apple Silicon and Intel builds). The free build is unsigned: on first launch, right-click the app and choose Open, then Open again in the dialog.
  • Windows  Distributed as a zip from GitHub Releases (x64 and ARM64 builds). The build is currently unsigned: if SmartScreen warns, choose More info, then Run anyway. SHA256 checksums are published alongside the release.
  • Linux  Distributed as a tar.gz from GitHub Releases (x64 and ARM64 builds). Extract, make the binary executable (chmod +x UwView), then run ./UwView. No package-manager distribution yet.
  • Online
The colour highlighter, with the bundled Web access (HTTP) preset loaded: regex rules colour status codes, IP addresses and syslog severities. Per rule you set regex, case, whole-line and text/background colours; order decides priority. Rule sets export and import as files, so a team can share one. 100M-line file, Japanese UI. Free edition.
Filter results in a separate window: 135 of 392 matches for GPZDA in a GPS NMEA log, each with ±2 lines of context. Double-click a hit to jump to that line in the main view; the window stays open. Results can be exported to a file. Keyword colouring and auto-detected encoding are shown. UwView Pro.
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Features

Properties

  1.  Lightweight

Features

  1.  Ad-free
  2.  Support for Large Files
  3.  C-sharp
  4.  Support for regular expressions
  5.  Cross-Platform
  6.  Tabbed interface

 Tags

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UwView information

  • Developed by

    JP flagamru195704

  • Licensing

    Proprietary and Freemium product.

  • Pricing

    One time purchase that costs $129, and / or subscription that costs $9 per month + free version with limited functionality.

  • Alternatives

    4 alternatives listed

  • Supported Languages

    • English
    • Japanese

AlternativeTo Categories

Network & Admin, Office & Productivity

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What is UwView?

UwView is a viewer for very large text and log files. Its defining behavior is that the entire file is viewable, scrollable and searchable from the moment you open it — you are not locked to the head of the file while an index is built. Indexing runs in the background, and line numbers appear once it completes.

The file itself is never loaded into memory. UwView memory-maps it, renders only the visible lines, and resolves line positions through a small sparse index, so memory use stays flat regardless of file size.

Verified on real data: a 51 GB / 892,239,125-line XML file (OpenStreetMap Japan) and a 258 GB / 4,509,830,821-line file (OpenStreetMap United States). In the 51 GB case, resident memory was about 27 MB of index plus about 33 MB of managed heap, and jumping to the last line took well under a millisecond once the index existed.

Features:

  • Progressive open — view and search the whole file immediately, on the first open
  • Automatic character-encoding detection (UTF-8, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, UTF-16), useful for Japanese logs
  • Full-text search with history, saved filters, and a non-modal results window that supports jump-to-line, export, and configurable ±N lines of surrounding context
  • Multi-keyword color highlighting with regular expressions; bundled presets for syslog and HTTP access logs; rule sets are shareable as files
  • Real-time tail, session restore (reopen where you left off), and recent/favorite files
  • Cross-platform: Windows, macOS and Linux (Avalonia / .NET), plus a browser build via WebAssembly

Free for personal use and for internal use inside a company, under the PolyForm Internal Use License 1.0.0. Source is published on GitHub. Redistribution and embedding in a product or service require a separate commercial licence.

A paid edition, UwView Pro, adds a persistent index and a compressed sidecar cache: from the second open onward the file opens instantly with line numbers already in place, searches run against the compressed cache (measured at roughly 9× faster on a 48 GB file, under the conditions documented on the site), and a log can be archived at about one ninth of its original size and still be opened and searched directly.

Honest note: the first open still has to read the file once at the speed of your storage. What UwView changes is that you can read and search it while that happens, rather than waiting for it to finish.

Official Links