Rowscope
Rowscope is a file viewer for large
text files. It can read files larger than 1 GB.
It is very fast (a few seconds to examine a 1GB file) and it never
blocks.
Here is a video showing how it works.
The idea back Rowscope is that a person cannot read the whole file when it is so large; a person can only read some parts
of the file, possibly the ones that contain the information he is looking for.
For example when somebody reads the log file produced by an
application, he will probably look for a specific error or for the lines produced in a specific
period of the day.
With Rowscope the user:
- Localizes the part or
parts of the file that he wants to read, using search strings or regular expressions.
- Then he can expand one
of the rows he has found, which means that he makes Rowscope display
the rows immediately before or after that row.
Going back to the log example, let's say the user wants to find what
caused an error in the application. Knowing that the application logs
its errors, he searches for the word ERROR.
Rowscope finds the rows containing this word. There is one specific
row that describes exactly the error that he is looking for.
Selecting the row and pressing the expand
back
button the user is able to display the rows immediately before the
error
row, getting to know the events that preceeded and possibly caused the
error.
The main features of Rowscope are the following:
- It never blocks the GUI.
The user is able to write text and click buttons when Rowscope is
loading a file.
- It does not monopolize the CPU.
There are moments in which Rowscope uses some CPU, but it never blocks
the other applications.
- It does not use a large amount
of memory. It uses some MBytes of memory, but it never becomes a
problem for the operating system or the other applications.
- It is always able to stop.
It is always possible to stop or close Rowscope, also when it is
loading/analyzing a file.
Rowscope is written in Scala and uses SWT for the GUI. The Rowscope icon comes from Wikimedia.
