Log files are dull to look at. Lines and lines of text and no pretty colors to make it nicer to look at and easier to spot those weird errors you can’t simulate on your machine.
Vim rocks and writing a syntax file is supposed to be a breeze judging from the vast amount of syntax plugins out there. I didn’t quite find one I liked for syntax highlighting HTTP log files, so I thought I’d get down and dirty with some vimscript myself and see if I could hack something together.
It turned out alright I think. So to share the fun I’m hosting the logsyntax.vim plugin on Github and the vim.org scripts library for all to use. It highlights dates, HTTP verbs, URLs, IP addresses etc for IIS, W3C extended, NCSA and probably a bunch more typical log formats.
May your logs be pretty and colorful from now on.
