Improve Zed logging (specifically talking about zed.log)

[tommyming]

What are you proposing?

I am proposing to improve the layout of Zed logs, which provides a better "search-and-filter" implementation.
I would like to introduce categories to the log file as well, to improve search efficiency.

Why does this matter?

The current telemetry log lists out the default telemetries implemented to Zed, and it is live updated.
But the current zed.log only opens as a text file, which is not live updated.
Log Observation is important when trying to debug different components of the IDE, or developing extensions.

Apart from that, zed.log does not have an alternative way to filter out the logs, apart from search bar.

What problem does this solve?

I have been facing some problems when developing extensions. I want to check if the mcp server I am developing is loading properly. Everytime when I rebuild, zed.log does not update live, so I need to open log again, which is a bit cumbersome to me.

Also, the logs inside zed.log is a bit messy to me, so I would like to standardize a bit, to navigate different types of logs faster.

What becomes easier or possible?

It would be easier for developers to debug when they are implementing new custom extensions, or debug when trying to activate features in Zed (e.g. MCP Server, Agent Panel, etc), or just simply easier to check errors of the services of IDE

It also opens possibility for showing logs in a more interactive format.

Are there any examples or context?

I would like something similar to telemetry log, observed like tail -f linux command, and possibly a category bar, which can filter logs from different services inside Zed.

Possible approach

The whole thing is something "nice-to-have" to my understanding, as the log is already there and showing .
But there are some way to make it better :).

I would like to separate this request into 3 parts(erm. probably 3 PRs):

1. Make zed.log opens as an observable windows (sth similar to tail -f)
2. Investigate and Research on how to structure logs better, and how does categorization works.
3. Implement the categories bar/button/clickable stuff, to allow users to select different categories.

I am already working on (1), and do have some ideas about (2) and (3). I will share more details once the corresponding pull request is done.

Questions to the Zed Team

May I know if there are any plans about improving Zed logging from your side?
I want to make sure if the content here will not conflict the work that the team is working on/planning to do.

Thanks a lot reading till here.
Feel free to comment/ let me know if there are any questions/improvements!!

[SomeoneToIgnore]

No explicit plans so far in Zed team to work on this.

I suspect, proper log rotation and some kind of a limit to highlights (for large files) would be needed on top of the work proposed.

[tommyming]

Thanks for the reply @SomeoneToIgnore .

For log rotation, I saw that currently there are default mechanism already implemented (?), since I found zed.log.old in the logs folder. Let me know if I missed something.
As I saw from the codebase, currently the rotation is size-based, I think this approach is good enough for the current scale.
One thing I can think of to improve, is to, maybe, introduce multi-generation rotating scheme.

About the limits to highlights, I agree on that loading up large files of highlights would be a great problem. I agree solving this before (2) and (3) is needed.
Are there any current issues/PRs are already focusing on this?

[SomeoneToIgnore]

To me, it seems sub-par to have one rotation exactly, on startup, as it allows accumulating large files.

I do not think there are any PRs or attempts to focus on anything mentioned in this discussion.

[tommyming]

I do not think there are any PRs or attempts to focus on anything mentioned in this discussion.

To clarify, there are no PRs or attempts to focus on large files highlighting handling specifically?
I am not sure is this related to syntax highlighting or some sort. Since if I need to tackle that, I need to make a check on the tree-sitter.

[tommyming]

After stepping back to look at the discussion thread, I felt I am have been mislead from the thread by myself, sorry for that.

I think I will work on the log viewer first, keep the 1000 line queue limit, thats all.