Rowscope

Rowscope is a file viewer that can read files larger than 1 GB. It is very fast (a few seconds to examine a 1GB file) and it never blocks.

The idea back Rowscope is that a person cannot read the whole file when it is so large; a person can only read some parts of the file, possibly the ones that contain the information he is looking for.

For example when somebody reads the log file produced by an application, he will probably look for a specific error or for the lines produced in a specific period of the day.

With Rowscope the user:

 1. Localizes the part or parts of the file that he wants to read, using search strings or regular expressions.
 2. Then he can expand one of the rows he has found, which means that he makes Rowscope display the rows immediately before or after that row.

Going back to the log example, let's say the user wants to find what caused an error in the application. Knowing that the application logs its errors, he searches for the word ERROR.

Rowscope finds the rows containing this word. There is one specific row that describes exactly the error that he is looking for. Selecting the row and pressing the expand back button the user is able to display the rows immediately before the error row, getting to know the events that preceeded and possibly caused the error.

The main features of Rowscope are the following:

 * It never blocks the GUI. The user is able to write text and click buttons when Rowscope is loading a file.
 * It does not monopolize the CPU. There are moments in which Rowscope uses some CPU, but it never blocks the other applications.
 * It does not use a large amount of memory. It uses some MBytes of memory, but it never becomes a problem for the operating system or the other applications.
 * It is always able to stop. It is always possible to stop or close Rowscope, also when it is loading/analyzing a file.

What is new in this release:

• This version adds a setup file for Mac OS X and the ability to filter by line numbers.

What is new in version 1.1:

• Row line numbers are now shown.
• The improved GUI is more compact and professional.
• Multiple cores can be used to search in rows.

Requirements:

• gtk+
• Java 2 Standard Edition Runtime Environment
• SWT
• Scala