Nifty Log Viewer
Read log files faster: colored levels, error counts, jump to the next error, filter by level or text, follow live logs, fold stack traces, and open huge logs.
Maintained. No sign-in. No telemetry. Works in VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VSCodium and other editors that use Open VSX.
Features
- See problems at a glance. Error and fatal lines are tinted red and marked in the scrollbar, warnings are highlighted, and debug and trace lines are dimmed so the rest stands out. Timestamps are muted.
- Understands the usual formats:
2026-09-28 10:00:00 ERROR …, [E], logfmt (level=warn), JSON logs from pino, bunyan, zap and structlog ("level":"error" or "level":50), Android logcat (E/Tag:), syslog and access logs.
- Counts in the status bar: errors and warnings in the current log. Click it, or press
Alt+F8, to jump to the next error; Shift+Alt+F8 goes back.
- Filter a log by minimum level and text,
/regular expression/ or !text to exclude. Matching lines open beside the log with their original line numbers, and stack traces stay with the error they belong to. Press Enter (or Ctrl+click) on a line to jump to it in the full log.
- Follow live logs. Turn on Follow and the log stays scrolled to the end as new lines are written, like
tail -f.
- Fold stack traces (Java, .NET, JavaScript and Python tracebacks) to skim past them.
- Pretty JSON on hover for JSON log lines.
- Huge logs. VS Code won't open files over a certain size with extensions enabled. Open End of Large Log… reads just the last 10 MB (configurable) so you can see what happened most recently.
- Works in the browser on vscode.dev and github.dev; Open End of Large Log needs the desktop app.
Commands
| Command |
What it does |
Nifty Log Viewer: Filter Log… |
Show only lines matching a level and/or text |
Nifty Log Viewer: Follow Log (tail -f) |
Keep the log scrolled to the end as it grows |
Nifty Log Viewer: Go to Next Error |
Alt+F8 |
Nifty Log Viewer: Go to Previous Error |
Shift+Alt+F8 |
Nifty Log Viewer: Go to Next Warning or Error |
Include warnings |
Nifty Log Viewer: Go to Line in Original Log |
From a filtered view (Enter) |
Nifty Log Viewer: Open End of Large Log… |
Read the last megabytes of a huge log |
Settings
| Setting |
Default |
What it does |
nifty.logs.colorLevels |
true |
Tint and dim lines by level |
nifty.logs.keepStackTraces |
true |
Keep stack traces when filtering |
nifty.logs.tailMegabytes |
10 |
How much Open End of Large Log reads |
Install
- VS Code: search for "Nifty Log Viewer" in the Extensions view, or install from the Visual Studio Marketplace.
- Cursor, Windsurf, VSCodium, Kiro, Antigravity: install from Open VSX.
Privacy
This extension collects no telemetry and needs no account.
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See all 100+ Nifty extensions and web tools at https://getnifty.dev
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