Documenting success with lnav on Windows?

[shoffmeister]

I grabbed the latest RC release and got this working on a corporate Windows notebook - it's quite simple once you know what to do, and rather less obvious if you don't.

What would be the best way to share this for the lnav at large?

(the magic: mkdir /tmp and cp -r lib just the right way...)

[hugosius]

i'd also really also appreciate some info on that. while i got lnav running on windows i am still not sure if all runs as it is supposed to. e.g. there seems to be an issues with encoding:

also could not figure out what and where the home directory of lnav is and where config changes are saved to.

[tstack]

I think I've fixed this encoding issue, things are looking right in Windows Terminal now:

[hugosius]

this works now. great!

[FaffeF]

The shorthand info/warning/error icons are still messed up, but emojis in the files seem to work

[tstack]

Thanks for pointing this out, I think the shorthand icons are fixed now.

(The emoji issues are related to the difference in size of wchar_t on linux/mac vs win)

[FaffeF]

Looks good in the latest build! Though I wondered for a while if the fire extuinguisher was on purpose 😀🔥🧯

[FaffeF]

Care to share any tips? Can't get lnav to run here.

[tstack]

Hi folks,

I've been trying to improve the Windows experience a bit. I've removed the dependency on the terminfo directory and the configuration is stored in the directory referred to by the APPDATA environment variable. You can try out the changes on a nightly build, like this one:

https://github.com/tstack/lnav/actions/runs/16657621699

You should be able to run the binary without any extra setup. But, it still depends on the msys-2.0.dll being in the same directory. I'm testing with Windows Terminal and PowerShell/cmd.

There is still an issue with emojis not showing up right. Not sure how to fix that yet.

[FaffeF]

This mostly works now I think. Would appreciate another tag to be able to att lnav to Winget.

It should then be possible to add releases to winget via GitHub actions, perhaps using https://github.com/vedantmgoyal9/winget-releaser

[tstack]

I've made a v0.13.1-beta1 tag if you want to give it a go.

[FaffeF]

hmm, there are no built binaries, not sure why? Winget needs somewhere to download the build, it doesn't build from source. Downloading from the latest action doesn't work, even for testing (the download doesn't seem to be named)

[tstack]

Apologies, the release action creates a draft and I forgot to publish it (I just did a publish on that tag). I like to verify things after the process before publishing. Related to that, it looks like the action you referenced requires a published release as well. So, to leverage it, I'll probably need to kick the action some other way rather than as part of the release workflow.

[FaffeF]

cool, this seems to work well enough for starters.

Will submit PR to winget-pkgs, when/if thats merged it would then be possible to add a release flow with winget-releaser

[hugosius]

I confirm that lnav now works without the /tmp folder. Winget would be good!
Any idea what to do regarding the alleged encoding-issue?

[hugosius]

another problem i have is that the copy to clipboard functionality does not seem to function. i get this error:

[tstack]

Thanks for the heads up! I think I have this fixed now, it's working for me in Windows Terminal.

[tstack]

The biggest issue I'm having at the moment is that Windows file paths cause issues in some places. For instance, the command-prompt treats backslashes as an escape character, so a Windows path needs to be single-quoted or each backslash needs to be escaped. Another problem is that the std::filesystem code in msys does not recognize Windows paths correctly, so things like getting the parent directory do not work, which means TAB-completion does not work. I'll need to spend some time thinking and fiddling to figure out an approach to get this working smoothly. Thanks for your continued patience.

[FaffeF]

Ok, great. File globbing is mostly not working either. These examples don't work for me:

lnav folder\*.log
lnav folder\logtest.*
lnav -r *.log

Though forward slashes work

lnav folder/*.log

Not sure what you mean by tab completion not working, I could at least :open ../appdata/roaming/lnav/somefile using tab completion

[tstack]

Hmm, I think the msys2 stuff is screwing with wildcards like folder\*.log. They're being passed into lnav's main() with backslashes removed. I've tried a few things without success, will keep looking.

[tstack]

Okay, I worked around the globbing issue and I think the top-of-tree is working pretty well. If folks could give it another try, I'd like to know if there are any gaps. I still need to update the documentation, though.

[FaffeF]

lnav crashes immediately if I :open \, which is an intuitive Windows thing to do if you want to get to the root of the drive.

:open c:\temp\*log works!
lnav c:\temp\*.log\ works"

not lnav -r c:\temp\**\*.log, but I'm not sure that's reasonable on Windows? (ls -r c:\temp*.log in pwsh will return all log files in that tree)
not :open ~, but I blame cygwin for that.

I'd say this is good enough, but may confuse me sometimes.

[tstack]

I think the crash with :open \ is fixed, but it behaves kinda strangely depending on where you start it. I also fixed a few issues with UNC paths, so they should work now as well.

I don't think the "**" in lnav -r c:\temp\**\*.log works anywhere. lnav just uses glob(3), which doesn't descend.

The latest beta build should have these and some other fixes:

https://github.com/tstack/lnav/releases/tag/v0.13.1-beta3

[chaplin2000ad]

This is so wonderful to find. Well done! Please don't keep it hidden
The Windows binary should have its own section on https://lnav.org/downloads
I've been using lnav on Windows in WSL for 20 months, but having a Windows binary should make adoption in Windows land easier.