tstack/lnav

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

10613 stars · 399 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

lnav is an advanced terminal-based log file viewer that automatically detects log formats, merges multiple files by timestamp, and lets users search, filter, and query logs. It includes a TUI with histogram views, syntax highlighting, and a SQLite interface for analyzing log data with SQL.

Use cases

• view and tail multiple log files merged in one terminal view
• search and filter server logs with regular expressions
• query log files using SQL
• find errors and warnings quickly in large log files
• pretty-print JSON-lines and structured logs
• visualize log message frequency over time with histograms
• analyze web access logs for failed requests

When to choose

• you need to correlate logs from multiple files or rotated logs in chronological order
• you want a zero-setup terminal tool instead of a centralized log server
• you need to run SQL queries against log data
• you work with many built-in log formats like syslog, nginx, or JSON-lines
• you want to tail live logs while still being able to scroll and search backwards

When to avoid

• you need centralized, distributed log aggregation across many servers
• you want a GUI or web-based log dashboard
• you need long-term log storage and retention
• you primarily process non-log structured data files

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

logging search-engine data-visualization developer-tools terminal-ui developer-tools monitoring analytics windows cli cross-platform log-viewer log-analysis tui pager tail sqlite log-monitoring log-format-detection command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="tstack/lnav")