TailSharp is a document / file monitoring solution based on the idea of the Unix 'tail' command. The tail command reads the final few lines of any text given to it as an input and writes them to standard output (which, by default, is the monitor screen).

TailSharp has a search functionality as you may know it from your webbrowser. By pressing Ctrl+F the input focus is moved to the search field in the toolbar. Just enter the search phrase and press the enter key. TailSharp will automatically highlight the next occurance of the search pharase. To continue searching press F3, to search in the other direction press Shift+F3.

Before doing a search you should pause the document monitor as TailSharp will scroll to the bottom of the file when a change happens.

A Highlighter is a search that automatically highlights (colors) all matches in the visible area of the document. To add a highlighter type the search prase into the search box, press the drop down search button and select "Highlight all matches" from the menu. TailSharp will then prompt you for a color. Select one and press OK. Please note that TailSharp does not invert the text color, so picking "black" might be a bad idea as you wont be able to read black text on a black background.

To remove a highlighter select it from the search fields drop down box, press the drop down search button and select "Remove highlighter". You will be prompted if you want to remove just the highlighter (future matches wont be colored) or if you want to remove all current colors.

Tail sharp is able to monitor file changes in real time. As I cannot imagine any real use for this, the file monitoring is in cached mode by default. In the case you need real time monitoring you can turn it on using the options dialog box.

In real time mode every change in the file will be directly displayed. If a file changes too frequently this will cause a high CPU usage and might render TailSharp unusable forcing you to kill its process.
In cached mode TailSharp will accumulate the changes of the last 150 (default) milliseconds. You can modify this value using the options dialog box. In cached mode the text will scroll smoother and the CPU usage will be very low.

The Unix tail command only displays the tail of a file. As a result the memory footprint is very small and the performance is high. For the same reason TailSharp by default only displays the last 100 KiBytes (default value) of a file.

Displaying the complete file is possible but not recommanded as this will make TailSharp consume a lot of memory if you work with large files and will also slow down operations like opening the file, applying highlighters and doing searches. To toggle the display mode open the options dialog box.

Requirements:
* .NET Framework

The license of this software is Freeware, you can free download and free use this search tool software.