SnakeTail to monitor chat logs - Feature Request

[Oklahoman]

If you are a programmer and care to look at it, I would love to see a version of SnakeTail that could better support COHs "Log Chat" feature by allowing you to filter out lines you don't care to see. The source code for SnakeTail is available at https://github.com/snakefoot/snaketail-net/releases.

 

If there is a better FREE program for this already, please let me know. I know that Herostats could monitor feeds like this for combat data, but I don't know of a way to use it for this purpose - if it's even still being worked on.

 

I use SnakeTail on a second monitor to tail my "chatlog yyyy-mm-dd.txt" files, generated from the game. Using SnakeTail's Edit->View Options->Keyword Highlight feature, I can color code various lines to draw my attention. For instance, if someone mentions BAF, LAM, DD, or MSR, the line is highlighted. It's not perfect because if someone in general chat says something is "LAMe" or it makes them "maDDer than anything" it gets highlighted. Still, I like having the chat on a separate monitor because I can increase the font size, color code based on [Tell], [Team], [League], etc. As my eyesight goes downhill, it helps to be able to see chat better without sacrificing gaming space.

 

The one feature I would love to be able to do is filter new lines out of SnakeTail if they do not contain certain keywords - like those I just mentioned. The chatlog grabs pretty much ALL the channels, along with some combat data, that isn't helpful for what I am wanting. I do want to see and highlight lines like "has defeated the Drop Ship" for instance, as well as those that contain [Looking for Group], [Team], etc.

 

I'm a novice programmer at best, and I struggle with C#. It's possible I could get there myself with much effort, but someone more skilled might be able to basically duplicate the "Keyword Highlight" tab to a "Keyword Filter" tab in no time, and maybe several of us with aging eyes would benefit.

[AboveTheChemist]

I don't monitor my CoH logs in realtime, but I did when I played EverQuest. I wrote my own parser in Python to, among other things, watch for lines containing certain keywords and report them to me. It ran in a command prompt window and would display only those lines with the relevant keywords. It didn't have a GUI or anything fancy, but it got the job done. It sounds like something that simple might do what you need it to.