Broot navigates directory trees, finds files, and launches commands from a terminal.
Open source
24 alternativesLnav
lnav navigates log files and provides tools for searching, filtering, and querying logs.
About Lnav
Lnav is a terminal log file viewer. When pointed at files or directories, it decompresses files as needed, detects their format, merges entries by time into a single view, tails files while following renames and new files, builds an index of errors and warnings, and pretty-prints JSON-lines.
In its interface users can jump between errors, search and highlight with regular expressions, filter with regular expressions or SQLite expressions, view a histogram of messages over time, and analyze messages with SQLite. When used with journalctl, logs spanning multiple years require a year-including format such as short-iso, otherwise lnav gets confused.
Key features
- Decompress, detect format, and merge logs by time
- Tail files, follow renames, and find new files
- Index errors and warnings with quick error navigation
- Search, highlight, and filter with regular expressions
- Pretty-print JSON-lines and structured text
- Analyze messages with SQLite and view time histogram
Best for: Terminal users who need to review, search, and query multiple log files together.
Good for
- Merges files by time and handles compressed files, unlike tail, grep, and less as described
- Combines regex search, filtering, SQLite analysis, and a time histogram in a terminal interface
- Offers SSH demo and tutorial accounts for trying before installing
Watch out for
- LOG view displays only log messages that were recognized after indexing
- Gets confused by multi-year journalctl output unless a year-including format like short-iso is used
Lnav at a glance
- Website
- github.com/tstack/lnav
- Category
- Software & Utilities › Linux & Mac Apps
- Type
- Open-source project
- Pricing
- Not confirmed. Check the site
- Open source
- Yes · Source code
- Language
- English
- Last checked
- Oct 5, 2026 · Online when checked
- Listed
- Oct 5, 2026
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Lnav FAQ
How can I try lnav before installing?
SSH to [email protected] for sample logs, or to [email protected] for an interactive tutorial.
How do I use lnav with journalctl?
Pipe output with journalctl | lnav, use journalctl -f | lnav to follow, and journalctl -o short-iso | lnav for logs spanning multiple years.
How do I install lnav?
Download a statically-linked binary for Linux, macOS, or Windows from the release page, use brew install lnav on macOS, or pkg install lnav on FreeBSD.
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