You can download the first beta for 1.4 if you like.
Here is the link:http://www.log-expert.de/LogExpert_1_4_3692.zip

For 1.4 I changed the cell painting code of the DataGridView. This now allows individual words on a line to be painted with different colors. The code needs a bit of testing, so I released the beta in an early state (compared to my previous releases). I use the 1.4 versions at work since some days. So feel free to test it too. The new highlight features are very cool!


Here are the changes compared to the 1.3 final version:

• Now you can highlight single words (i.e. substrings) instead of whole lines.
  Highlighting whole lines is still possible of course.
• The search function (Ctrl+F) will now highlight all search hits (via the new highlight feature).
  Use ESC key to remove highlights.
• Filter result list has a new context menu entry to highlight all filter hits in the log view
• External tools now can have an initial working directory
• Columnizer for Glassfish logfiles
• Bugzilla reporter enhanced:
  - a CC can be added
  - build number is included in bug report
• Fixed Bug#31: Exception when passing '/?' as command line parameter
• Fixed Bug#6: Correct order of tabs is restored on next startup (only for file tabs, filter tabs are still kind of random, this will be fixed later)
• Fixed Bug#25: Encoding is now stored in .lxp files

Regarding the new single-word-mode highlighting:

1.
For now the old-style whole-line highlight settings will be processed before any word-mode highlight settings. That means if there's a matching whole-line highlight entry in the highlight dialog settings before the first word-mode setting, then the complete line will be colored using that line-mode settings. No further checks will be applied.

2.
If the first matching highlight entry in the list is a word-mode entry, then all the magic will begin: All following highlight entries will be checked and used. The word-mode settings will color only the matching words. The first matching line-mode entry is used for the background color of areas not matching any word-mode entries.

Understand?

Maybe I change that behaviour a bit in the future. The only reason for the fast-fail mode (see 1.) is a performance consideration. When using many highlight settings there's a lot of work to do on every single line (splitting every cell, determining draw regions, multiple drawings with different colors etc.). But if I see that the performance is good enough, I will remove the special fast-fail behaviour for old line-mode entries.

A couple of us tested out v1.4 beta and thanks a ton for adding the encoding to the lxp file! The setting works like a charm and is much appreciated.

We did notice that log text looks 'different' than before. It's hard to see the bottom text from each line. For example, the tail is removed from the lower g. Text also appears bigger than before using the same font settings. Text often runs together and sometimes extends beyond the column border. This obviously doesn't affect functionality, but I thought I'd mention our findings.

Thanks again!

Thanks for testing!

Yes, there are some font issues. The 'amout of the bug' depends on font settings. I think Lucidia Console works better than Courier New.

In the meantime I changed the draw code (used some other API). This looks much better but I am really concerned about the performance when having lots of highlight matches in 'word mode'.

Another known issue is the filter: There seems to be a bug (I think new in 1.4) when the logfile is deleted and created anew. The filter window keeps some invalid entries in this situation. Furthermore: When the filter output is piped to another tab, the piped tab seems to produce endless filter hits in a loop in this situation. I just recognized this bug today.