Log Highlight and Filter

Colours your log files by level, then lets you filter them down to just the lines you care about — without leaving the editor and without a shell pipeline.

Highlighting

Open any .log file and levels are picked out automatically:

Timestamps are dimmed so the message reads first.

Colours come from your theme — editorError.foreground, editorWarning.foreground and friends — so it looks correct in light, dark and high-contrast without any setup.

Filtering

This is the part a highlighter alone cannot do.

• Log: Filter by Level — tick the levels to keep. Errors and warnings are pre-ticked, because that is what you want nine times out of ten.
• Log: Filter by Text or Regex — type timeout, or /user_id=\d+/i for a regular expression.

Either opens a read-only view beside your log, with the original line numbers kept, so you can find the line again in the full file:

2 of 1,284 lines — data-service.log — ERROR+FATAL

 418 │ 2026-09-13T18:32:02.114Z ERROR [db] SequelizeConnectionError: timeout
1097 │ 2026-09-13T18:32:05.000Z FATAL [main] unrecoverable, shutting down

Navigation

Alt+Down and Alt+Up jump to the next and previous error or warning. The status bar shows how many of each the file holds — click it to filter.

Built for large files

Highlighting is computed for the visible part of the file plus a margin, and recomputed as you scroll, so a multi-hundred-megabyte log stays responsive. Files above logHF.maxFileSizeMB are skipped entirely.

Settings

Use Log: Toggle Highlighting for This File to turn it off for one file.

Works alongside other log extensions

This one adds decorations rather than claiming the log language, so it sits happily next to whatever syntax highlighting you already use.

Author

Irfan Ali

MIT licensed.