---
layout: post
title: "Competing with 'tail -f'"
date:   2013-09-10 00:00:00
excerpt: The standard utilities are tough competition.
---

Probably the toughest competition for lnav is the standard Unix utilities like
tail, grep, less, and emacs/vim. It can be hard trying to convince people that
these built-in commands that they've used for forever can be improved upon. The
advanced features of lnav might even work against it since folks are expecting
to have to learn a bunch of stuff to see any benefits.

The reality is that there are quite a few "passive" features in lnav that can
provide value with no effort required by the user. For example, lnav can easily
replace 'tail -f', it's even shorter to type!  Beyond the basic task of
displaying new lines appended to a log file, you also get to see log messages
from multiple files interleaved, the ability to scroll backwards, syntax
highlighting, live searching, and so on. These basic features do not have the
same "wow" factor as executing a SQL query over data automatically extracted
from a log file, but they're the features that get used 90% of the time.

Anyways, I think I'm gaining a new appreciation for marketing/sales...
