tstack
Permit wrapping of single fields
It would be useful to add as an overflow method "wrap", wrapping long fields on multiple lines. The enable-word-wrap command wraps full lines, but it messes up fields alignment. Fields well aligned improve the readability of well structured log files like JSON.
The use case: I have a JSON log file with quite common fields (timestamp, level, file, line number, hostname, stacktrace, message, ...); I wrote a custom log format to pretty align fields (some are fix-width, some can be easily either padded or truncated) but stacktrace and message have, of course, a variable length. As a workaround I put them at the end but this is suboptimal as:
- stacktrace and message cannot be aligned (actually they could if they were mutually exclusive, but in the general case with two variable-length fields you cannot get alignement)
- I have to scroll to the very end of line in order to see the message, which is tedious, I could miss important messages if I forget and anyway I should also move the timestamp in order to see it near the message
- for errors, the stacktrace usually have newlines in it (it would be pretty hard to read if it has not); by putting it at the end of the line it wraps at the beginning after a newline, thus I need to scroll back and forth
I know I could use a SQL query for making a nice table, but ";SELECT * FROM my_log" seems to me a too long command for such thing, and it is not persistent.
Well, this slipped through the cracks... sorry. I don't know if you care any more, but I wanted to mention that if you leave the field out of the line-format, it will be displayed on the following lines. In the following screenshot, exc is a defined value that is not in the line-format, so it get displayed more like a key/value pair:
