Hey,

I have logs produced by programs that print to the terminal with colors using escape sequences.

I usually use VIM (or gvim) to open logs, but seeing all those escape sequences instead of colors really bother me.

Is there a way to set VIM to use esacape-sequences (as opposed of showing them on screen)? if not, do you happen to know a solid text-editor that can do that?

Thanks,
Mintz Yuval

Well, the point of a text editor is to edit text files, not process them, so I'm going to guess that you're out of luck on this (on the other hand, vim can make toast and do dishes if you configure it right and want to deal with the somewhat painful documentation, so you never know).

Google around. What you want is some kind of VIEWER, not editor. This is like: you view web pages in a browser, you edit them in a text editor. They look very different in these two places for good reason -- the purpose of the text editor is for editing the html code.

I do GUI programming and it would be a simple task to write something to do what you want, so perhaps someone has done it already -- you just have to find where they put it.

I guess you're right and I've mis-pronounced my purpose.

I'll google for it; if someone can point me to such a viewer, I'd be grateful.

Thanks,
Mintz Yuval

Given that a number of text editors can be set to do colouring of text dependant upon input language (C, C++, perl, bash script...) if you find a tutorial on how to set up one of those for a new language, you may be able to modify things so that it highlights dependant on escape sequences. Don't underestimate the work in this approach, though.

Best I could find on this...

http://blog.hartwork.org/?p=88

You might want to look at the Text Terminal HOWTO at the www.tldp.org website.

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Text-Terminal-HOWTO.html#toc22

Also look at the setting of the console program you are using. You may be able to simply change the terminal emulation settings, allowing the colors to be displayed properly when viewing a log in the less program.

Thanks. Yeah I read the less manual,but not thoroughly enough.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...uences-511166/

less -R <file with escape characters>

Well, "less -R" obviously work - but my original intention was to find an editor that can show colored ANSI qoutes, not a viewer; and unless I'm terribly misinformed, less does not qualify as one.