logViewer

What's New

Add oldLog function

Features

logViewer improves the functionality of NVDA's built-in Log Viewer, making it more powerful for developers and advanced users who need to analyze logs efficiently. Key features include:

• Advanced Search:
  Press Control+F to open the search dialog.
  Supports case-sensitive search, wrap-around, regular expressions, and search history for quick reuse of previous terms.
• Quick Search Navigation:
  Jump to the next search result with F3, or go back to the previous one with Shift+F3 — without reopening the search dialog.
• Bookmark System:
  Add bookmarks using Control+F2.
  Navigate between bookmarks using F2 (next) and Shift+F2 (previous).

Old Log Backup:
When NVDA automatically restarts after a crash, the log you’ll want to check is the oldLog file.>NVDA+Control+L.
This file is generated and monitored in the background during NVDA’s operation. After NVDA crashes and restarts itself due to an error, oldLog.txt contains the most recent session

Old Log Functionality

The LogViewer plugin includes features to manage and preserve NVDA log content in an oldLog.txt file, ensuring logs from current and previous sessions are backed up and accessible.

Key Features

• Automatic Log Backup: Continuously saves new NVDA log content to oldLog.txt in the NVDA configuration directory every 5 seconds, using incremental reading for efficiency.
• Previous Session Logs: Appends the previous session's log (nvda-old.log) to oldLog.txt when NVDA starts, with a timestamped header for clarity.
• Daily Reset: Resets oldLog.txt with a new timestamped header if the date changes, keeping logs organized by day.
• File Rotation: If oldLog.txt exceeds 5MB, it retains the last 1,000 lines and archives older content to a new file (e.g., oldLog_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.txt).
• Access Old Log: Press NVDA+Ctrl+L to open oldLog.txt in your default text editor for review.

Handling NVDA Crash and Restart

When NVDA crashes and restarts:

• The previous session's log (nvda-old.log) is automatically appended to oldLog.txt with a timestamped header during plugin initialization.
• The plugin detects if the current nvda.log is smaller than expected (indicating a crash) and resets the file pointer to ensure accurate incremental backups from the new log file.
• Continuous backups resume, preserving all log data without loss.

This ensures that logs are reliably preserved, even after unexpected crashes, and can be easily accessed for debugging or review.

Language Support

This add-on is designed to work seamlessly with NVDA in any language.

Instead of checking the window title (which depends on UI language), it detects the NVDA Log Viewer using its window handle.

This ensures full compatibility across all languages NVDA supports.