Debug Output Filter

Debug Output Filter (aka "Niah Text Filter") is a quality-of-life extension for Visual Studio that filters and organizes your debug trace output, build output, and find-in-files results.

Maintain organized histories of debug sessions, builds, and search results.

Fully harness trace debugging by quickly filtering your debugger output messages to find that Needle In A Haystack (NIAH).

Type your filter text to instantly filter Visual Studio debug output. Enter multiple texts to filter within filters as many times as you need to get to the important information.

KEY FEATURES

• Live filter debug output, find-in-files results, and build output.
• Chain these filters together to filter Visual Studio output as many times as required to filter out the noise and focus on what’s important.
• Filter files and clipboard text as well as Visual Studio output (great for filtering logs, git histories, source files, or just general text files).
• Maintain a history of debug sessions, builds, and find-in-files operations and their results (useful to compare last run with this run).
• Integration with Unity (Unity output is now piped into Visual Studio)†.
• Separation of build output into projects (one per tree node instead of 1>, 2>, etc. in the output window).
• Automatic error and warning filtering on build output to quickly see which projects have warnings and errors as you build.
• Separation of multiple process/thread output into separate tree nodes instead of being interlaced together (essential when debugging multiple instances/threads at once)†.
• Display of line numbers, line count, and relative timestamps for each debug output line.
• Double click on a debug output line to jump to the line that wrote it†.
• Filter on whole words, case sensitivity, starts with, ends with, regexes, and so on.
• Preview surrounding lines by clicking on an output line.

† To use these features, you need to drop a little extra code into your project. I provide samples on niahtextfilter.com that you’re welcome to use/modify as you like.

VIDEOS

Niah in 60 seconds https://youtu.be/CmkWAgWKyS8

What is Niah Text Filter? https://youtu.be/0Zp7Ry5s02Q (5+ mins)

SCREENSHOTS

Maintain histories of builds, debug sessions, and find-in-files results. Live filter debug output as your application is running.

Quickly and easily chain multiple text filters together to cut through the noise and focus in on the information that you need, now.

Build output is automatically separated into projects to easily visualize your complicated builds.

Filter clipboard text and files - perfect for filtering log files, version histories, and source files.

MORE INFO

The VS2022 package is here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GrantDavies.NiahTextFilter2022 (the marketplace does not support multiple packages on one page). The same license will work across both packages.

niahtextfilter.com